Burnout
Exhaustion as more than fatigue — a collapse of identity, desire and direction.
Psychological Thriller · Feature Film · In Development
Honourable Mention · Woman in Fan · Sitges
Enter to
burn.
break.
return.
SAUNA Burn. Break. Return.
A burnt-out woman is sent by her best friend to a mysterious retreat where rest quickly becomes something far stranger.
Inside the retreat, she is drawn into a series of surreal psychological trials that strip away the roles, expectations and identities she has carried for too long.
To leave, she must confront what remains beneath the exhaustion — and reclaim the self she thought she had lost.
The Film
What begins as escape becomes initiation.
The retreat promises recovery, stillness and release. Instead, its rituals begin to destabilise the boundaries between therapy, hallucination and transformation.
Each trial pushes her further away from the identity she has performed for others — and closer to the parts of herself she has avoided.
At its centre
Sometimes the self cannot be recovered. It has to be remade.
The Journey
Heat strips away the surface. The body remembers what the mind buried.
Ritual
The retreat becomes a threshold between care and confrontation.
Transformation
Each surreal trial breaks apart another version of who she thought she had to be.
Identity
Reclaiming the self not as a return, but as a radical act of becoming.
SAUNA
To come back to yourself, something has to burn.
A psychological thriller about exhaustion, identity, transformation and the frightening freedom of becoming someone new.
