Here’s something from director Magnus Von Horn that caught my eye recently—made in Poland, this is one that casts its eye onto that ever insane and fractal world of social media. Vapid a lot of it may be, a festering hive of misinformation, drivel, and general lunacy it may also be…but it is what informs so many nevertheless, and it’s not like the media of old was exactly free from mindlessness either. So with that in mind, how does this one pull the spotlight on such a world?
Our focus is Magdalena Koleśnik as Sylwia, a fitness influencer with a sizeable following—and as such, part of the game is constantly posting everything from general workout tips to what’s for dinner to of course hawking the inevitable sponsorship stuff. That’s before she bucks the trend by posting something actually intimate, something that I guess touches on the whole paradox of social media—that for all the connections across the globe you get, it still can feel oh so isolating if you have so many anonymous eyes focused on you.
And from there Sylvia has to navigate the attention from randoms on the streets, be they innocuous to the unsavory, to dealing with authentically confused family members (including Zbigniew Zamachowski, who starred in a magnum opus of Polish cinema with Dekalog). The general interactions and performances are convincing enough, and Koleśnik certainly does a solid job carrying the proceedings. You’ve got your main theme of disconnect through the screen—especially when we get into the latter act when things get more disturbing, and misjudgements made.
That being said, ultimately our payoff is something that still gets said earlier in the film, well-acted as it is. There’s certainly something left to ponder on, but the point could’ve been made just a bit harder, and with Sylwia’s arc wrapped up just a little more. We know that the world of digital performance and staged reality all done in the name of the mighty algorithm can feel isolating—but what comes next?
That still leaves Sweat as worth a watch even if perhaps not one that may entirely satisfy all. If nothing else, when so much gets dictated in thirty second clips or 280 characters or less, when we can’t even trust whether we’re seeing actual flesh and blood represented by pixels any more…it feels a damn site more real than a lot of what it touches on.
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