Mathias Broe attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Sauna” at Library Center Theatre. (Photo by Michael Hurcomb/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Jessica Herndon
Set against the backdrop of Copenhagen’s LGBTQ+ scene, Danish writer-director Mathias Broe’s debut feature, Sauna, is an evocative exploration of queer identity and romance. Co-written with William Lippert, Broe’s film follows Johan (Magnus Juhl Anderen), a gay man who works in a bathhouse and who often engages in empty hookups with men he meets online. After meeting William (Nina Rask), a transgender man with whom he connected online, their bond evolves into an intense romance that tests them both unexpectedly.
Sauna, premiering in the World Cinematic Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, delves into the complexities of queer relationships with striking intimacy. Broe’s storytelling brims with raw emotion and rich nuance as Johan and William navigate many layers of attraction, class, identity, and self-discovery. Both lead actors deliver mesmerizing performances, with Andersen’s magnetic presence perfectly complementing Rask’s vulnerable yet commanding portrayal.
Broe vividly remembers the actors’ chemistry test. “I mean, you should have seen them casting; it was so hot!” he says during the January 27 post-premiere Q&A as the audience cheers. “As a director, I believe you can’t necessarily make people act better. You find a framework, and then in that framework, you find the right people. We had a lot of great people come in, but Juhl and Nina really embodied the characters. Of course, we had a lot of intimacy scenes, and for me, it was important to actually see bodies that we don’t normally see on screen and be intimate with each other. I really wanted to see something that I could relate to and be like, ‘Okay, this how I relate to sex and intimacy.’”
An intimacy coach was key to choreographing many of Andersen and Rask’s scenes. “We had two or three meetings where we were like, ‘I’m going to put my hand here, and then I’m going to move it up,’” remembers Andersen. “[It was] very unsexy and very awkward,” he deadpans, making the crowd laugh. No scene ever comes across as awkward in the film, though. Adds Andersen, “Everything was planned and talked about, and it made a safe space, and I think you can see it in the movie.”
In an important step for Danish cinema, Rask, a trans actor, brings a long-overdue authenticity to the screen, embodying a role that resonates with rare truth and depth. “I definitely have a lot of trans masc lived experience that I brought into the character,” Rask says. “In Denmark, [the population is] only 5.5 — almost 6 million — people, which means that bringing stories like this to the cinema really takes a lot of warming up,” adds Broe. “This film is the first time a trans person is in a leading role in a Danish film, which we are very proud of.” For Broe, growing up queer in Denmark in the ’90s was tough. He was constantly mocked. But making Sauna was empowering. “We are so proud to tell our own story,” he says.
In many ways, Broe’s connection to the material runs deeper than fiction. While developing the screenplay, his partner began their own transition, lending an autobiographical resonance to the film’s narrative. Broe says working on the film also became “a therapeutic way of transitioning myself, and going through this gay cis environment that I used to identify with, into a more queer state.”
Sauna also tackles class within the queer community. “One of the things that was interesting about the storyline and William’s character was that he is this queer, intellectual, upper class, big city trans guy who meets this more lower-class suburban queer cis guy [who] has not had a queer community around him his whole life,” explains Rask. “That brings a lot of friction, and they don’t have much language to talk to each other about it. The multidimensional world that we’re brought into is very interesting. The majority of people think that the queer community is the same. But there is a lot of friction in class that is going on.”
With Sauna, Broe not only crafts a beautifully layered love story but also pushes the cultural conversation forward, spotlighting the evolving paradigms within queer communities and the universal longing for profound connection.
