Review: Sweat, As Parable of Social Media, Wants for a Little More Satirical Bite

Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context.

Sweat
Photo: MUBI

“Sorry, but I post what I want,” states internet-famous Polish fitness instructor Sylwia Zajac (Magdalena Koleśnik) in Magnus von Horn’s second feature, Sweat, when confronted by her agent-slash-business manager, Luksus (Mateusz Król), about a recent social media video that’s gone viral. The clip in question is a candid confessional where Sylwia discusses the abject loneliness that consumes her life, capped by the emotional plea, “I would really like to have someone special by my side.” News outlets are now speculating on Sylwia’s state of mind and one of her sponsors has complained. “They’re worried about their product appearing in that kind of context,” Luksus warns a clearly ruffled Sylwia, as if she were in imminent danger of being canceled for saying something inappropriate.

But as Sylwia is all too aware, her online persona has become much larger than herself. With 600,000 followers and counting, her social media platforms are less a personal diary than a promotional tool for her one-woman fitness lifestyle brand. Exhibiting the perfect life, the perfect body, and the perfect attitude is second nature to Sylwia, whose constant positivity is crucial in motivating her legions of fans and making money for the corporate health-supplement sponsors that she cheerily shills in regular video updates.

The confessional, therefore, is a rupture of the carefully perfected image that Sylwia has so studiously maintained, allowing the cracks in her façade to show for the first time. Sweat follows her over the course of three days, leading up to an eagerly anticipated morning-television appearance, and the way her world spirals out of control once the confessional drops initially unfolds as an urgently contemporary parable of hyperconnected psychosis.

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Right out of the gate, Sweat immerses us in one of Sylwia’s “Sweat Tour” workout events at a local mall, showing the cult-like authority she has over her adoring followers (or, in her words, “my loves”). But her energy and conviction on stage belies her loneliness, because soon she returns to an isolated existence in a sleekly impersonal apartment, surviving on take-out meals provided by her food sponsors. Worse, she now has a stalker (Tomasz Orpiński), whom she catches masturbating in a parked car outside her building. After chasing him off, he later posts a disturbing video love letter in response to her online cries for companionship. But when she tells the people around her, including Klaudiusz (Julian Świeżewski), her workout assistant and potential sexual fling, their reactions range from the absurdly nonchalant to the shockingly violent, with nary a thought from anyone about simply calling the police.

Had von Horn given in fully to his satirical urges, the writer-director might have landed on a savvier examination of a new kind of celebrity worship. But Sweat opts for a more straight-faced and bluntly allegorical approach, with the stalker plot thread mostly existing to make the obvious point that those surrounding Sylwia can be less caring and empathetic than a creepy rando. The film’s commitment to a hyper-naturalistic shooting style and narrative thrust, gradually dissipating its fledgling sense of surrealism, also ends up leaving too much room to question the real-world credibility of the histrionic reactions to Sylwia’s confessional.

When one of the hosts (Anna Kalczyńska) from the climactic morning show grills Sylwia on-air about her video, questioning the young woman’s motives for sharing such private matters and flat out asking if she went too far by posting it in the first place, the moment somewhat strains for believability, since the raison d’être of an influencer’s life is to hype themselves up in such baldly personal ways. If anything, it’s easier to see Sylwia’s social media “breakdown” becoming more warmly embraced by an online audience wanting to rally around and share in the real emotions of their favorite stars, rather than being cartoonishly shamed in the press.

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In this way, Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context. And in Kolesnik, von Horn at least has an actress ideally suited to the task. She simultaneously nails Sylwia’s spunky Instagram-ready sheen while signaling the bottled-up pain within, particularly during emotionally tortuous interactions with her unfeeling mother, who regards her daughter’s achievements with utter indifference.

In the film’s sharpest sequence, a woman (Dominika Biernat) claiming to be an old school acquaintance approaches Sylwia while she’s out shopping and, unprompted, proceeds to tell her about a traumatic miscarriage she endured in the years since they last saw each other. Sylwia genuinely listens to this before responding with her own struggles with loneliness, at which point the energy changes and the mysterious woman abruptly ejects herself from the conversation. But not before asking for a selfie, which Sylwia poses for with a smile that only barely masks the mental exhaustion that she feels from such a confusing, parasitic interaction. Even when Sweat doesn’t always meet this level of character introspection, Kolesnik’s star power is as radiant as the character she plays, smoothing over some of the film’s missteps to keep us invested in her quixotic search for authentic offline acceptance.

Score: 
 Cast: Magdalena Koleśnik, Julian Świeżewski, Aleksandra Konieczna, Tomasz Orpiński, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Dominika Biernat, Mateusz Król, Anna Kalczyńska  Director: Magnus von Horn  Screenwriter: Magnus von Horn  Distributor: MUBI  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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