Intimacy Exploited: Magnus von Horn's "Sweat"

A fitness instructor's performative journey through the social media landscape raises questions of authenticity.
Caitlin Quinlan

Magnus von Horn's Sweat is showing at the Quad Cinema in New York City starting June 18, 2021 and will expand on June 25, 2021.

In an early scene in Magnus von Horn’s sophomore feature Sweat, fitness instructor and internet personality Sylwia runs into a woman at the mall. It’s not immediately clear whether Sylwia really knows her or not, a blank stare slowly morphing into a friendly smile for the person who has interrupted her day. Is this a follower eager to meet their idol, or an old friend? The line is blurred for both protagonist and audience. When the woman breaks down in front of her, expressing her deepest personal sorrows, it reveals something more insidious about the influencer-to-follower relationship than just Sylwia’s indiscernible connection. Why does this woman reveal herself so dramatically to someone who barely recognizes her?

Fed by a new kind of social media culture that has distorted basic human interaction, this delusion of personal boundaries has grown more invasive over the last decade. Influencers share carefully selected parts of their lives to audiences online and in return, those audiences feed on the minutiae of their existence. “We’re friends,” viewers think, expecting that with each passing day their level of access will increase to near omniscience. It is giving someone an inch and them taking a mile, a modernized tug of war between the perceived and the perceivers. But it is also a cleverly orchestrated system of performance and advocacy in a capitalist sphere; the myth of friendship between a social media star and their audience can, for example, sell products in a way that traditional brand advertising can simply no longer do.

As society begins to reckon more and more with the rise of the influencer as personality, marketing tool, and proponent for causes and commerce, so must cinema. Over the last decade, social media (in a broader sense) has been investigated more thoroughly on film; 2010’s Catfish was a notable beginning to a fervent documentary focus on the subject, while in the same year, David Fincher’s The Social Network was the first major narrative film to position the creation of a social media platform as an historical moment. Across horror and B-movie genres, the threat of a mysterious friend request or a dangerous trawl through someone’s search history have been easily utilized to play on our fears of the internet as a site of violence, where our vulnerabilities are most compromised. But the influencer on film—and their role in consumer culture— is just getting started, despite a hyper-documentation in other forms of media.

Magnus von Horn’s Sweat is one of the first fiction narratives to tackle influencer life directly, with an observational look at three days in protagonist Sylwia’s life that astutely toes the line between voyeurism and interiority. Close-up camerawork, often focusing on the protagonist’s eyes or maintaining proximity to her rapid movements, is a key formal device here for navigating ideas around intimacy. It is, in particular, a film interested in the dualities of intimacy in an internet sphere, the excess felt by one and the lack felt by the other. It is also uninterested in demonizing the world of the online personality and instead makes a pointed effort to consider the ways in which the consumption of such a world contributes to an often toxic environment as much as the output itself.

As an exercise instructor Sylwia is revered from the moment she steps onto stage, a bright-eyed pop star complete with her own microphone headset and a crowd of adoring fans. It is her encouragement and motivation they crave, her belief that keeps them moving. Despite this adoration, loneliness eats at her every off-camera move. A broadcast of her feelings to 600,000 followers does little to alleviate her suffering. “Accept yourself” goes one of her fitness mantras, yet it’s fundamentally an act she requires others to do for her. Her stamp of authenticity, crucial for the influencer market, is her willingness to discuss just how much she longs for love. von Horn doesn’t treat this entirely with cynicism nor with earnestness, always balancing the tone of the film somewhere in between. 

This understanding, both in cognitive and empathetic terms, of the world of the influencer is expertly harnessed in the filmmaker’s creative decisions. Location and setting are often nondescript, the non-places of the shopping mall and the motorway reflecting the kind of welcoming universality that an online figure thrives in. Sylwia’s life could be taking place anywhere; it is, in fact, taking place everywhere, on the phones and networks of followers around the world. It is perhaps this lack of definition that really allows a personality to grow, invading any space with a generic affability. Sylwia’s cookie-cutter apartment and her uniform of sleek and colorful gym wear maintains this critical neutrality. There is aspiration in what is generic, what is achievable. 

Despite this tendency towards the unremarkable in location and production design, Sweat defines its temporal parameters effectively. It’s a film that manages to not be bound by any kind of delay, that, in its immediacy and close focus on these consecutive days in Sylwia’s life, stays abreast of this ever-changing influencer culture. Where other films might lose relevance in the months or years between production and release, Sweat feels closely in tune with the contemporary moment. Sylwia’s demand for her food company sponsor to have all recyclable packaging, for example, is the kind of public statement a personality needs to consider in 2021. Still, the director is unafraid to push at the boundaries of this world and to consider the ways in which it might change and develop for better or worse.

Sweat’s thorniest and most challenging narrative concerns Sylwia’s stalker, a man she first encounters while taking her dog out for a walk. Faintly hidden behind the tinted windows of his car, the man watches her, beginning to masturbate once she realizes his stare and approaches him. The violation is traumatic and confounding; her own mother later comments that “maybe he was a nice guy,” to Sylwia’s dismay. His act dominates much of the film, a worrying extreme on the spectrum of her fans’ obsessions but also a particular display of male violence that will go on to be repeated by a character closer to Sylwia. The film’s darkest turn sees Klaudiusz, her fellow fitness instructor and potential lover, beat Sylwia’s stalker to near-death after they spot him once again waiting outside her apartment. When Klaudiusz returns to the room, sweaty, hands bloody, he expects their hookup to continue and when it doesn’t, he proceeds to carry out the very violation enacted by the stalker in the days prior. 

Intimacy is exploited, stretched, twisted, broken down to such a degree that Sylwia’s eventual response to the film’s climactic moment has a counter-intuitive kind of clarity. Her interaction with Klaudiusz ends without further harm inflicted and her attention turns to the stalker, still lying black and blue in his car. Helping him reach a hospital, her generosity masks her shaken and disturbed psyche. The dynamic between the two shifts here as Sylwia does what she can to protect someone who has made her feel unsafe. The film’s questioning of what intimacy really is provides one of the few moments of genuine feeling.

How will such an event change her? The film probes this question in its final moments as the morning of a career-boosting television appearance arrives. Her defiance in the face of the media’s scrutiny and mockery of her career path is palpable, her cold, blue-eyed stare never wavering. Von Horn incites an uncertain kind of sympathy for Sylwia—again, the balance between cynicism and earnestness is carefully handled. How do we respond to her displays of self? Do we believe in her performances? What has happened to us, even, to make us believe it must all be false?

Such is the blurring of meanings and distortion of communication in a social media landscape and Sweat deploys this issue to cutting effect. As Sylwia’s stalker lies soaked in his own blood, broken down on the ground, he repeats with an incessant fervor the same phrase Sylwia might use to sign off one of her Instagram broadcasts: “I have to go now, I have to go now.” 

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