The Music Stops at the Door
A Case Study of Sauna (2025)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“Sauna gives Johan control of the experience, but not control of what it means.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine the specific filmmaking mechanisms that make a work function, how those mechanisms are constructed across departments, and what another filmmaker might learn from them.
Content notice and spoiler warning: This study discusses explicit sexual material, transphobia, gender-affirming care, substance use, theft, and AIDS-related loss, and reveals the film’s ending.
A film can stay loyal to a character without becoming his alibi.
Mathias Broe’s Sauna spends nearly its entire running time beside Johan. The camera stays physically close to him. The narrow frame keeps separating him from the people and spaces around him. The editing moves according to feelings Johan hasn’t learned to name yet. Music can turn his desire into romance, his intoxication into disorientation, his memories into dreams, and his worst decisions into grand gestures.
None of that makes him right.
Cinematographer Nicolai Lok describes the visual objective as pulling the audience into Johan’s world, keeping the camera close enough that the story could be experienced from inside his perspective. The 1.55:1 frame was chosen partly because it could isolate Johan within the image rather than settle him inside it. Editor Linda Man says restructuring, performance, dialogue, sound, and music were all shaped around the psychology and development of the characters. Taken together, those accounts support a film organized around one man’s subjectivity.
That creates the actual problem this study is about. If the movie stays this attached to Johan, how does it stop his pain from becoming proof of his interpretation? How does it make his loneliness fully understandable without letting the loneliness excuse what he does to William? Broe has already discussed queer space, intimacy, and the danger of projecting oneself onto a partner in interviews around the film’s festival and release campaign. None of the interviews reviewed for this study addresses the formal mechanism underneath those ideas at the level argued here.
The answer is not distance. Sauna never withdraws its empathy from Johan. Instead, it divides authority across the filmmaking. The camera can belong to Johan while a room contradicts him. The edit can follow his feelings while refusing to complete a thought he hasn’t confronted. Music can inhabit an action emotionally while silence lets someone else judge it differently.
By the time someone else finally looks through the camera, Johan’s music can no longer follow him.
Someone Is Looking
The company logos play in near silence. Only the sounds attached to the logos themselves, then darkness.
Then, faintly, a bell.
The bell is attached to an elastic anklet on a nude man’s leg, beside his locker key as he moves through the film’s Adonis sauna. The camera follows Johan up the final stairs into a room so dark that its occupants are reduced to suggestion. Bodies shift beyond the edge of the image. Low sounds of pleasure give the unseen room its shape.
Johan does not look carefree. His expression is tightly restrained. He isn’t simply moving through Adonis. He’s searching it.
He enters a stall, locks the door, kneels, and looks through an opening at the sounds on the other side. The film stays with the person looking. It refuses to show us what he sees.
That refusal will govern everything that follows. Proximity to Johan does not mean access through Johan. We can share his position without inheriting his knowledge. We can feel the force of his desire without being told what it means.
The image fades. The title appears. The atmospheric score disappears, and the film erupts into a crowded bar. A friend named Asif asks Johan who he’d most like to have sex with. Johan points someone out. Asif delivers him, and the film cuts directly into vigorous intercourse. The man on top of Johan pushes his face down and to the side — brief, unremarked, and enough to remove reciprocal recognition from the encounter entirely. Johan’s body stays useful. His face becomes something to redirect. The partner finishes, dresses, and turns down Johan’s offer to stay. Johan looks hurt.
The film leaves.
On a first watch, that departure can feel fractionally hurried — the expression barely registers before the next day arrives and Johan is already cleaning Adonis. The film will later prove it knows how to hold silence, bodies, and unresolved faces for an uncomfortable length of time. Its early abruptness isn’t a failure of nerve. It belongs to Johan. He has felt something. He has not understood it. The film does not understand it for him.
At work, Johan is methodical in a way he isn’t anywhere else — cleaning surfaces, laundering towels, prepping rooms, maintaining an environment built for anonymous bodily exchange. Faint background music gives the front desk the bland acoustic texture of any business. Deeper inside, the music recedes and bodies become the soundscape instead. Johan moves comfortably between the two layers. Socially, he is uncertain. At work, he knows exactly what every room requires.
That evening, another app connection arrives at his apartment. They’ve exchanged profiles, not names. The visitor removes his shoes, takes a beer, joins Johan on the bed — and when Johan’s hands move toward his chest, stops him. The film pauses its own expected progression. Johan realizes the person beside him is trans, reacts awkwardly, and is told he might have understood this had he read the profile more carefully. The visitor starts to leave. Johan asks him to stay, and finally introduces himself. The other man gives his own name back: William.
Only after the interruption, the boundary, and the exchange of names do they kiss again. The structure is simple and exact. Johan’s first encounter gives him sex without identification. William enters through the same apparatus — profile, doorbell, beer, bed — and forces the apparatus to change.
Desire can continue. It has to accommodate information Johan failed to absorb, and a boundary someone else defined for him.
They meet again in a park and embrace easily in daylight. The film then cuts hard into an apartment so dark that the two men stay unreadable for almost thirty seconds. We hear them moving. We know they’re together. Their faces don’t become available until Johan turns on a desk lamp. What follows differs sharply from the opening hookup — Johan lets it develop gradually, asks, receives an answer, and the film spends less time on the sex than on the negotiation that made it possible. In the morning, Johan wakes with William still in his arms and looks at him without a peephole, a wall, or the anonymity of the cold open standing between them.
The tension in his body has loosened. The film doesn’t translate the loosening into language.
Something has changed. Johan doesn’t yet know what.
The Room Johan Thinks He Knows
Johan asks William if he’s ever been to Adonis. William hesitates. Johan tells him it’ll be fine.
They buy two admissions. Johan moves through the locker room the way someone moves through a home — undressing without ceremony. William has to construct a procedure instead: a towel held around himself, trousers removed beneath it, a decision to keep his shirt on. Johan doesn’t pressure him. He accepts the adjustment and takes William’s hand as they walk in together.
Nothing needs explaining out loud. The difference between their bodies matters less here than the difference between their relationships to the room. Johan’s body behaves as though it belongs. William’s body has to plan how it will become visible at all.
The public corridors of Adonis carry faint, innocuous background music. As the two men move into its private interior, that layer disappears — pleasure, breath, doors, footsteps, voices, nothing else. They find a stall. Then Rolf pounds on the door.
The absence of score makes the interruption unusually rude. There’s no musical warning, no emotional insulation. The knock enters the same exposed acoustic space their intimacy was just occupying, and takes it over instantly. Rolf tells Johan William can’t be there, and misgenders him. Johan experiences the conflict as something still arguable. William recognizes, faster than Johan does, that the room has already answered. By the time Johan gets free of Rolf and reaches the lockers, William is gone.
Johan lies alone in bed. The film holds the disappointment just long enough to settle into his body, then replaces the quiet with exterior street noise — not explosive, but forceful enough that ordinary life feels intrusive arriving this soon. He goes back to Adonis and passes fresh graffiti on the outside wall: FUCK THE CISTEM. Inside, Rolf is furious. He threatens to call the police and label it a hate crime.
Johan has just learned that his own comfort inside a queer space tells him nothing about whom that space will recognize.
Broe has described Adonis as both a place of desire and a home for Johan, and also as a deliberately separatist space, built on an older cruising tradition — and he’s named access, and the different degrees of privilege people carry into a space at different times, as an underlying layer of the film. The filmmaker has confirmed, in his own words, exactly what this room is doing. Access to space isn’t where this study is trying to land, though. It’s evidence, gathered early, because the film keeps building on it.
Johan understands how Adonis receives him. He mistakes that familiarity for knowledge of what Adonis is.
His reassurance to William was sincere. It was not informed.
William Opens the Door
Johan withdraws at work, drinks with Asif, and checks William’s social media beneath a table. The post is location-tagged. Johan finds the address and walks to a different club. This time, he’s the uncertain visitor. The bouncer doesn’t wave him in — he has to explain why he’s there — until William sees him, vouches for him, and leads him inside, telling him to check his coat because it’ll be warm below.
The geography reverses Adonis exactly. Johan tried to guide William into Johan’s world. William now guides Johan into his. It isn’t an equivalence. William’s sponsorship carries real authority here, whereas Johan’s assurance at Adonis did not.
Sound makes the whole journey legible without a word of dialogue: a low bass thrum outside, growing at coat check, fully dominant on the main floor, receding in a side room where drugs are being taken, present but diminished in a quieter communal area, announcing the dance floor acoustically before the picture cuts back to it. A listener could navigate this club by ear alone. Broe has recalled filming the film’s two large party sequences at real Copenhagen clubs, with hundreds of people from the local community turning out to populate the production — a social density no number of repositioned extras could fake.
Johan and William move together through those bodies. The lighting keeps reducing the dance floor to fragments, but obscurity no longer means isolation the way it did at Adonis. There, Johan stood apart and searched the darkness. Here, he enters it with William.
The film has already broken its own simplest visual metaphor. Darkness can conceal. It can also hold people together. Daylight, which arrives later, will leave Johan far more painfully exposed than any nighttime scene manages to.
The night ends at a lake. The club noise disappears and morning birds replace it. Johan apologizes for what happened at Adonis. William accepts that he didn’t mean any harm, then reminds him that he’d asked, beforehand, whether Johan was sure.
The distinction isn’t between good and bad intentions. It’s between intending to protect someone and actually having the knowledge to do it.
At William’s apartment, the relationship settles into quieter physical care: Johan applies Testogel to William’s inner thighs, they talk about the discomfort of binding and the money still needed for top surgery, they play with bubbles. It’s domestic, affectionate, easy. Then Johan goes back to Adonis, handles the till, and pockets some of the cash. When he’s confronted, he says he wanted to help pay for the surgery. That’s true. It doesn’t cancel the consequences — he loses the job, loses access to the sauna, and eventually loses his housing with Michael too.
Motive explains the act. It does not undo it.
When Johan goes to William afterward, he doesn’t confess. He rewrites what happened, saying he quit voluntarily because he didn’t want to keep working somewhere William wasn’t welcome. The lie converts failure into sacrifice. Johan isn’t merely withholding an embarrassing fact anymore. He’s controlling the version of himself William is permitted to know — at the same moment he keeps insisting William deserves to be properly recognized by the world around them.
The lie works. William reads Johan’s departure as solidarity.
The film’s response is genuinely strange, once you notice it. It rewards the lie with music. A warm, dreamy score carries the moment into the brightest, most open stretch of the film — William’s recovery progresses onscreen from taped dressings and fresh post-operative incisions to exposed healing scars; the two of them share food, stories, time. Broe has said the film’s early spaces were built deliberately dark and claustrophobic, and that the section where Johan and William truly open up to each other was designed to become lighter, more colorful, more open.
That expansion is genuine. So is the deception sitting underneath it. The film doesn’t puncture the happiness to expose the lie. Johan and William really are happy. They’re also living inside a condition Johan secretly altered.
William gives Johan a strap-on over dinner, and the gift lands with easy playfulness rather than ceremony. Before the film puts it to use, though, it pauses on something much smaller: a fly moving across the window. The insert lasts long enough to register as deliberate, then the movie cuts into bed.
What follows echoes the physical configuration of Johan’s opening hookup while rejecting almost everything about its emotional construction. William tops, but the framing remains face-on. Eye contact holds. Touch moves in both directions. The encounter is lusty and physical, but reciprocal throughout. The difference is not sexual position. It is recognition.
Broe and intimacy coordinator Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup developed the scenes with Magnus Juhl Andersen and Nina Rask in advance, using a red-yellow-green boundary system. Before principal photography, Broe and Lok also worked with Bedside Productions—a Copenhagen collective devoted to ethical, queer and feminist pornography—on a pornographic shoot for its Bedtime magazine, using the experience as practical preparation for photographing intimacy in Sauna. The preparation shows up onscreen as specificity rather than caution. The opening hookup makes Johan’s loneliness bodily. His first night with William turns negotiation and consent into attraction. This later encounter shows how a superficially similar act can become emotionally opposite once faces, knowledge, and reciprocity change.
There is no score cushioning the scene. Bodies, breath, movement, and room tone are allowed to carry it. Then, before the image changes, the sound of surf begins to arrive. The bedroom opens acoustically onto the beach before it opens visually onto one.
Johan and William run into the sea. Only after the location has established itself through waves and gulls does the score gradually join them, expanding the moment into a brief stretch of uncomplicated happiness. When they finally sit down to talk, the music recedes again.
It is there that Johan tells William about Jacob—his first recognized desire, and the rejection that followed it, the two of them drifting apart afterward. The scene does not announce this as an explanation for everything Johan will do next. It gives the behavior a history. Johan’s earliest experience of wanting another man became inseparable from the fear that recognition could cost him the relationship entirely.
That history will not absolve him. Sauna never stops understanding its force, either.
What Help Looks Like
Domestic life quietly exposes another gap between Johan’s public and private selves. At Adonis he was meticulous. In William’s room, dishes pile up until William comes home and starts cleaning them himself; Johan apologizes, William says it’s fine, and keeps working. The film doesn’t need to announce that Johan has gotten complacent. It just lets his behavior change with the room. The man who carefully maintained a business built for strangers leaves the ordinary work of a shared home to the person letting him stay there.
William asks Johan to pick up Testogel from a friend before a trip to Berlin. Johan agrees. It matters later, because for once William has supplied both the need and the shape help should take.
Johan visits Michael, his former roommate, braced for judgment over the lost job and the lost housing. Michael judges him. Not the way Johan expects. He points to a photograph, a preserved flower, a stone from Læsø, and tells him about Aksel — seven years together, no legal right to marry him. Aksel lived with AIDS for two years; when the doctors could no longer help him, Michael cared for him at home, and after Aksel died, Michael wasn’t even allowed to attend the funeral.
“You’re not as alone in everything as you think, Johan.”
The objects belong to a history that has occupied Johan’s home without occupying his attention. He could see them. He couldn’t read them. Michael isn’t denying Johan’s love or his suffering. He’s denying Johan’s assumption that suffering makes him uniquely alone. Broe has spoken about wanting this generational layer in the film specifically — younger queer people can get consumed by disagreements over language and identity while losing sight of what an older generation survived to make the present possible. That confirms why the scene exists. It doesn’t account for the specific weight of a history sitting, unread, in the room where Johan has been living. That observation belongs to this study.
There is no score under any of it. Music would offer relief. Instead the film leaves Michael’s voice, the room, and the objects fully exposed, with nowhere for Johan to retreat while someone else’s history dismantles his assumptions. When Michael finishes, Johan leaves his keys behind. The door closes like punctuation, and for a moment nothing rushes in to fill the quiet — only after the image has already changed does the ordinary noise of construction work outside the Gender Identity Clinic arrive to start the next scene.
That interval matters. Sauna frequently lets the sound of a new place arrive before its image does. Subway noise precedes the subway. Park ambience grows out of a spinning laundry machine. Club music announces the dance floor before the cut. Surf enters the bedroom before the beach appears. A train will later arrive acoustically while Johan is still crying. Here, deliberately, the film withholds that mechanism for a few extra seconds.
Sound in this film doesn’t only smooth a transition. It decides whether a beat gets an interruption, an overlap, or a period.
Outside the clinic, William gets off a call visibly shaken — afraid it won’t approve his treatment and he’ll be “stuck begging for leftover hormones forever.” Johan tries to reassure him. William hears it as minimizing. Johan stops talking and just holds him. William holds him back.
For once, Johan gets it exactly right. He meets a problem he can’t solve, stops inventing language for it, and simply stays.
Then he sees spray paint.
Johan goes back alone and tags FUCK THE CISTEM across the clinic’s own glass doors, then reports it proudly to William, apparently expecting approval. William sees the danger immediately: the clinic’s staff aren’t going to become more sympathetic because someone vandalized their workplace, and — more to the point — Johan isn’t the one dependent on the institution he’s just decided to attack on William’s behalf.
The pattern is unmistakable now. Johan knows William needs money, and invents theft. He knows William was hurt by the clinic, and invents vandalism. He knew William wanted to see Adonis, and overrode his uncertainty with borrowed confidence.
And yet Johan isn’t incapable of listening. When William asks him to get Testogel, he does. When a bloodstained sheet needs changing without explanation, he changes it. When reassurance fails outside the clinic, he eventually shuts up and just holds him.
He succeeds whenever William defines the need. He causes harm the moment he decides, on his own, what William’s need should be.
Broe describes the relationship in almost exactly these terms — Johan and William projecting their own dreams onto each other before they’ve learned who the other person actually is, and Johan’s desire to please repeatedly getting in the way of hearing the boundaries attached to what William says. William criticizes the vandalism directly. Johan responds by asking if William even wants him there — accountability converted into abandonment in a single sentence. “I want to be with you, Johan,” William tells him. “I’m only just figuring out how to be who I am.”
Johan doesn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. He retreats into the bathroom, unable to work out how to go back out. The film cuts to a bar.
He Feels It Before He Understands It
The earlier emotional exits start to make sense here. Sauna doesn’t cut because Johan feels nothing — Magnus Juhl Andersen repeatedly lets hurt, confusion, and embarrassment register before a scene changes. It cuts because Johan has reached the feeling and not yet the knowledge underneath it.
Feeling happens. Meaning doesn’t. Cut.
Editor Linda Man has said the first act was completely restructured in the edit so Johan would begin already in the middle of an existing life — mature enough to make William’s interest believable, established enough to have something real to lose by the midpoint — and that character psychology governed the restructuring, the performances, the dialogue, the sound, and the music alike. That production history doesn’t prove each early cut was engineered to represent Johan’s avoidance specifically. The finished film does that work on its own.
After a conversation with Asif, Johan starts apartment-hunting online. Dreamy scoring begins before the film even shows us what he’s doing; he opens DaddyHunt, takes provocative photos of himself, builds an image designed to attract an older man with money. The music belongs to the construction. Once he’s outside, traffic noise replaces it. He rides an elevator, reaches a stranger’s door, is let in — the camera following directly behind him so his own body occludes the man paying for this. The visual language recalls the film’s opening: the other person stays delayed, abstracted, barely necessary. The man confirms no drugs or alcohol, gestures to money already waiting on a table. The film cuts away. Johan sits afterward in the dark.
The encounter is framed as an attempt to solve a financial problem without requiring anything like a relationship. Under pressure, Johan has fallen back into a form of intimacy where the other person barely has to become a person at all.
Back at William’s, William notices blood on the sheet and asks Johan to move so he can wash it. Johan doesn’t interrogate it — he gets a clean sheet and remakes the bed. William comes up behind him and holds him. There’s none of the spectacle of Johan’s larger interventions here. It’s ordinary, requested, and it works.
William invites him to Teys’s party and insists Johan come as his date. After William leaves the frame, the camera stays on Johan for roughly fifteen seconds — sitting on the edge of the bed, half-dressed, surrounded by daylight and domestic disorder, with no score, no dialogue, no task, and no immediate cut.
The movie clearly knows how to linger. It has simply started denying Johan some of the exits it used to give him.
The Room Is Not Rejecting Him
Johan buys a conspicuous amount of alcohol for the party. William is surprised. Johan carries the bottles in anyway. Inside, William moves easily among his friends and Johan doesn’t. Nobody is hostile to him — Teys gently declines to talk about the clinic because it’s his party and he wants to enjoy it, not process someone else’s crisis. That’s a boundary, not a rejection. William checks on Johan. Johan insists he’s fine.
He isn’t.
He drinks past what the room can comfortably absorb, and the soundtrack starts reflecting his interior state rather than the party’s actual atmosphere — diegetic music giving way to something more subjective, the editing fragmenting time itself, cutting between the party and Johan already riding his bike toward Adonis, returning to fragments of his own toast before the picture has caught back up. The movie starts to feel drunk because Johan does. Eventually William sends him home. Not because Johan is cis. Not because he’s wandered into a space with the wrong kind of belonging attached to it. Because he’s behaving badly, in a way any room eventually stops tolerating.
This is the sequence that breaks the easy symmetry the film has been building since Adonis. William was expelled from Johan’s space because Rolf refused to recognize him as a man who belonged there. Johan is welcomed into William’s space, explicitly, as William’s date — and is asked to leave because of his own conduct.
The situations rhyme formally. They are not morally equivalent.
Johan doesn’t go home. He goes back to Adonis, and the film returns to its opening grammar — darkness, bodies, pleasure, anonymity — before the score turns dreamy and carries him somewhere else entirely. It’s the beach again, but it’s the story he told William earlier, visualized directly: white underwear gone transparent in the water, Johan staying submerged to hide what the moment did to his body, alone afterward while whatever he released dispersed in the current. Now William occupies the position Jacob held in the memory. The film has folded Johan’s present fear of losing William directly into his earliest experience of desire ending in rejection.
Lok identifies this as the film’s one sequence inside Johan’s mind, connecting the story Johan told earlier with the crisis he is experiencing in the present. That’s not this study reading a memory into the film. That’s what the filmmakers say they built.
Johan wakes. No score. William speaks from off screen, and the camera withholds him until Johan actually looks — subjective alignment in its purest form. Alignment doesn’t win Johan the argument that follows. He says nobody at the party wanted him there. William challenges the premise. Johan equates being asked to leave Adonis with being sent home from the party.
William tells him, simply, that it isn’t the same thing.
By now the film has given its audience enough evidence, room by room, to know exactly why he’s right. The theft comes out. So does the lie. Johan admits he stole for William’s surgery and then resents that William’s parents had already paid for it themselves — his gift curdling into an accusation, because William was never given the chance to define its shape.
“I’ve given you so fucking much,” Johan says.
William’s answer is five words: “I never asked for anything.”
The entire character mechanism, compressed into a single sentence. Johan has mistaken expenditure for intimacy — money, the loss of his job and housing, graffiti, alcohol, risk, and self-destruction, all of it accumulating into evidence he believes William should accept as love. William was never asked to define most of it.
The film doesn’t need William to be an infallible moral authority for the line to land. Broe describes him as protective, self-focused in the middle of an enormous personal transition, capable of building real walls of his own. These are two flawed people, not a sinner and the person sent to correct him. On this specific point, though, Johan’s own actions have already proven William right.
Staying this close to Johan for so long carries a real cost, and it’s worth naming rather than absorbing quietly into the argument. William has humor, community, sexual agency, medical fear, anger, and boundaries he enforces without apology — but for most of the film’s runtime, an audience meets nearly all of it while Johan is still in the room. Broe has said he and co-writer William Lippert discussed making William the protagonist outright, and concluded they weren’t equipped to tell the story fully from a trans perspective; they placed the love story first and Johan’s individual journey second.
That’s an honest account of a real creative limitation. The finished film’s decision to keep its camera overwhelmingly tethered to Johan — separately confirmed by Lok — gives that development choice a direct formal consequence: the more rigorously the film restricts itself to Johan’s incomplete understanding, the less independent interior access it can grant the person he keeps failing to understand.
The ending will partially correct that imbalance. It only needs a few seconds to do it.
The Music Stops at the Door
William leaves. Johan folds into himself and cries. Before the image changes, a train begins arriving — the next place entering through sound while Johan is still in the room, the same acoustic pattern that’s been running under the whole film, still working right up to the end. The picture catches up. He is alone on a platform, but turns away from the train.
Dreamy score returns. Johan picks up a brick, breaks into the pharmacy, steals its supply of Testogel. The music builds as he moves — through the break-in, the theft, the walk to William’s building, the arranging of the boxes outside William’s door. He has just heard “I never asked for anything” and responded by stealing something else nobody asked him to steal.
There is no conventional character growth here. Johan has learned new facts, lived through devastating consequences, and been told his mistake in increasingly direct language. Faced with helplessness one more time, he still converts love into intervention. The score doesn’t mock him for it. It understands exactly how enormous the gesture feels from inside his own head — propulsion, romance, urgency, sacrifice, all of it, right up until Johan finishes unloading the stolen Testogel outside the door.
Then the score fades. Johan hears movement inside the apartment. Ambient sound only. The film cuts to the other side of the door — a shot through the peephole — and very nearly all sound disappears with it.
The film opened with Johan looking through an aperture at someone the film would not let us see. It closes with William looking through one at him. It opened with Johan searching for access. It closes with Johan completely visible, and not let in.
No production source located during this research explains this specific choice, or ties it back to the visual rhyme with the opening. That silence in the record isn’t a hole in the argument. It is the argument, landing at the one moment the film chooses to make it without a single note of music underneath.
That’s how Sauna stays this close to an imperfect man without ever converting empathy into endorsement. The camera can understand Johan’s loneliness. The edit can move at the speed of his avoidance. The score can inhabit the romance he assigns his own worst decisions. None of those systems get to decide what those decisions mean to William.
Johan’s gesture gets music.
William receives it in silence.
The music stops at the door.
Editorial Postscript
Version Note: This study is built against the Amazon Prime US presentation of Sauna, purchased directly and running 1:40:19. That presentation is the timestamp and content master used throughout. Published runtimes vary: final official listings from the Danish Film Institute, TrustNordisk, and Frameline give 103 minutes, while an earlier TrustNordisk sales listing described the then-upcoming film as approximately 100 minutes, and some secondary listings give 105. This study does not attempt to reconcile those external metadata differences.
Mathias Broe directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with William Lippert, adapted from Mads Ananda Lodahl’s novel of the same name. No English-language edition of Lodahl’s novel was located during this research. A German translation by Andreas Donat was published in 2025, but this study does not attempt a direct text-to-film comparison. Nicolai Lok served as cinematographer, Linda Man as editor, Emil Davidsen as composer, and Mia Terry as sound designer and sound engineer. No verified production screenplay draft was located for comparison against the finished film.
The Amazon Prime US presentation used for this study is displayed at approximately 1.55:1, consistent with cinematographer Nicolai Lok’s published account of the film’s 1.55:1 framing.
A Note on Sourcing: This Case Study was built in two phases: an open sourcing pass across cast, crew, production, and reception, followed by a cold viewing pass logged in real time against the Amazon Prime presentation described above. Every scene-level claim above — dialogue, blocking, sound design, the specific placement of score against silence — is drawn from that direct-viewing log, cross-checked against a second, sound-focused pass through the same presentation.
Production and interview material is organized by source type rather than by a single confidence label, since those are not the same thing. A single direct interview can securely establish what a participant said; ten secondary articles can all be recycling the same press release, and repetition alone doesn’t strengthen a claim. Atlantis interpretation, separately, is not a weaker form of production fact — it is a different category of claim entirely, and one this study tries never to disguise as the other. In descending order of evidentiary weight, this study draws on: the released film itself — scene behavior, dialogue, sound placement, editing, and timestamps observed directly against the Amazon Prime presentation; official records — credits, runtime listings, and release information; attributed participant accounts — what Broe, Lok, Man, cast, or crew say, on the record, that they intended or did; secondary reporting and criticism, used for production context and reception rather than as primary evidence; and Atlantis interpretation — this study’s own reading of what the finished film appears to do, which is never attributed to the filmmakers themselves. A participant’s account confirms that the participant made the statement. It does not, on its own, prove that the finished film accomplishes what the participant says was intended. The released film remains the governing evidence throughout.
Two figures closest to the mechanism this study describes remain the thinnest part of the public record. Emil Davidsen’s ASCAP Sundance Composer Spotlight biography confirms that he scored Sauna; it does not explain his dramatic approach, and no interview was located in which he discusses the score’s logic scene by scene. No Sauna-specific interview with sound designer Mia Terry was located among the sources reviewed. Davidsen released a four-track EP containing music from his original score; that release establishes only what was commercially released, not the full amount of original score composed or used in the finished film. This study’s description of the score as used sparingly comes from the direct cue log of the Amazon Prime presentation, not from the EP’s track count.
This study’s governing argument — that Sauna uses the presence or absence of score, and the timing of sound against image at scene transitions, to control how much authority Johan’s subjective experience is given over events other people also witness — is an Atlantis interpretation of the finished film. It is consistent with broader on-record statements from the director, cinematographer, and editor about their general intentions, and with one specific, on-record account of a single cue (the Testogel-application scene) that closely matches the pattern this study describes elsewhere. No filmmaker interview located during this research states the mechanism at the level of specificity this study argues for. That gap is treated as a limit of the public record, not as evidence against the reading. Terms including “the music stops at the door” and the specific formal reading of the peephole reversal are Atlantis’s own framing, not language attributed to the filmmakers.
Sources and Research
- Production credits, cast, and crew — Danish Film Institute, TrustNordisk, and Sundance Film Festival records.
- Departmental credits, including sound design and score — Danish Film Institute and European Film Academy.
- Mathias Broe and Nicolai Lok on the film’s intimacy coordination and red-yellow-green boundary system, and on the film’s intended dark-to-light visual progression — Purple Hour, later republished in edited form by Cineuropa. Treated as one interview, not two independent sources.
- Mathias Broe and Nicolai Lok on preparatory work for the film’s intimacy scenes, including a series of films shot for Bedtime magazine before principal photography — Sundance.org.
- Nicolai Lok on cinematography, camera proximity, the 1.55:1 aspect ratio, the two large club shoots and their more than 300 community participants, and the construction of the beach/memory sequence as taking place inside Johan’s mind — Filmmaker Magazine (Nicolai Lok interview).
- Linda Man on the restructuring of the film’s first act and the role of character psychology in editorial, performance, dialogue, sound, and music decisions — Filmmaker Magazine (Linda Man interview).
- Mathias Broe on access, privilege, and belonging inside Adonis and the wider queer community — QulturVultur.
- Mathias Broe on projection, listening, and the risk of loving someone by centering yourself instead of them — Diversity Rules Magazine. This outlet identifies its material as supplied by Project Publicity rather than independently reported; Broe’s quoted answers are cited here as published participant statements, not as independent corroboration.
- Mathias Broe on Johan’s motives, his caring/pleasing nature, and the Testogel-application scene as a portrait of projected desire — queer.de. A German-language interview; English wording used above is an Atlantis paraphrase, not the outlet’s own English text.
- Mathias Broe on Nina Rask’s improvised line during the breakup scene — EDGE Media Network, used only to establish that the line was improvised. The exact wording quoted above was checked separately against the Amazon Prime presentation’s own subtitles.
- Emil Davidsen’s ASCAP Sundance Composer Spotlight biography, and score release information for his four-track soundtrack EP — ASCAP and Film Music Reporter.