Inside Copenhagen's Gay Bathhouse Scene: What the 2025 Film Sauna Reveals About Modern Queer Spaces
Between 2010 and 2020, widespread media narratives predicted the death of the bathhouse. Smartphone apps like Grindr and Scruff promised instant proximity without the cost of admission or the vulnerability of public entry. Hundreds of venues shuttered across North America and the United Kingdom during this stretch.
Yet in Northern and Western Europe, the narrative shifted. Venues in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen saw unexpected resilience, followed by a post-pandemic surge among patrons in their twenties and early thirties. Algorithmic exhaustion drove this return. Dating applications monetized rejection through monthly subscriptions, ghosting became standard, and spontaneous human chemistry was filtered through heavily edited portraits.
Bathhouses offer the opposite: unmediated tactile reality. You hear breathing; you assess physical chemistry instantly; you share a communal steam bench with men spanning fifty years of age differences and varied economic backgrounds. The physical space guarantees that you cannot simply swipe away the humanity of the person sitting across from you.
Sauna captured this dynamic at the exact moment global audiences needed to see it. Johan’s internal conflict stems from the fact that inside the bathhouse, he cannot hide behind an avatar. The concrete, moisture-slicked walls force him to confront his loneliness directly.
