Sauna Day Review: The Weight of Upholding Societal Norms | Brooklyn Film Festival
Societal norms, taboo desires, and silent acceptance.
Men and women venture to the sauna after a long week or day to feel the pleasure of tranquility. But inside a South Estonian men’s sauna room, other forms of pleasure lie hidden behind those dark, wooden doors.
Sauna Day feels like being a fly on the wall inside a men’s locker room.
There’s a vulnerability to this setting, not because of their very mundane conversation about work, but the wide age range of naked men sitting in a tiny, hot room as awkwardly as most straight men would act in that scenario. Probably the reason no one clocked the subtle glances that the two men on opposite sides of the sauna were sparingly stealing.
In an unexpected turn of events, those two men are left alone, assuming a position they seem to frequent for a titillating, dominant-submissive ritual.
After sharing an herbal flogging session, a lake cleanse, and a touchless cuddle floating side-by-side, it’s clear they’ve found some level of acceptance hidden beneath the shame of their taboo fantasies.
Sauna Day is provocative, suggestive, steamy, elusive, intimate, homoerotic, and riddled with loud silence, leaving ample room for interpretation and living in between the atmosphere of the main character’s thoughts.
A great watch in the narrative short category from the Brooklyn Film Festival.
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