Recensioni de* critic*

Swedish writer-director Magnus von Horn’s shrewd second feature... is not a straightforward send-up... Von Horn understands the gap between Sylwia’s authenticity online – mediated through the safety of a screen – and the intimacy her followers feel entitled to in real life.

After a few meandering moments in the second act, the film fully earns a grim, hollow, ending that subverts expectations by revealing the depths of Sylwia’s structural servitude. Sweat’s focus may blur on occasion, but its frenetic energy truthfully captures the tiny indignities of shallow connections.

While the heights of that first scene’s energy never quite return, its frayed ends continue to worry at the film’s edges. Indeed, it is in Sweat’s calmer moments where a feeling best described as empty relief sets in, like a post-anxiety ditch yet to be filled by another emotion.

Sweat could have easily demonised the internet, or those who use it as a lifeline — but the film is smarter and more sensitive than that, giving Sylwia great dimension beyond her public persona. The story rises above caricatures to offer potent and often moving commentary on the gulf between validation and affection, and the way intimacy and solitude have always been bedfellows.

Ambiguity lies everywhere, from the inspirational intent of Sylwia's videos versus her need for her followers to questions of where her 'performances' begin and end, with even the suggestion that elements of the stalker's emotions might well be mirroring hers.

The writer-director Magnus von Horn holds our gaze tight on his actress’ face for much of Sweat. Kolesnik rises to the challenge of the close-up, precisely communicating Sylwia’s undulating emotions in the slightest movements of her steel-blue eyes. She delivers an expertly crafted performance...

Swedish director Magnus von Horn’s film, set in Warsaw, is sharp, perceptive, and ultimately ruthless when it comes to life under the yoke of social media. It’s also smart enough never to regress into shallow, misogynistic finger-pointing. Sweat isn’t a lazy diatribe against Gen Z or millennial narcissism – it positions both Sylvia and her followers as the ultimate victims of the disassociation, commodification and depersonalisation that the internet itself causes.

The gap between difficult reality and filtered social media fantasy is ruthlessly exposed in this ingenious character portrait from Swedish film-maker Magnus von Horn.

The buildup to that [TV morning show] gig creates a natural suspense for Von Horn’s tight timeline, and combined with cinematographer Michał Dymak’s restless, close, verité-esque camerawork and loose scene dramatics, “Sweat” can at times feel like one of those star-sanctioned documentaries that unwittingly capture more than the subject may have intended to reveal.

Von Horn taps into the shock waves that go through the media every time a bright entertainment or music star is found to be suffering from depression. But he also seems to want to redeem a portion of cyberspace, as a place where a few brave souls can still air their anguish. He succeeds in the few scenes informed by liminal emotions, in which his protagonist hovers between despair and indifference.

It would have been so easy to sneer, but Swedish director Magnus von Horn instead takes a compassionate look at that most modern of phenomena: social media influencers. In his quest to find the human frailty behind the veneer of perfection, he's aided by the mesmerising work of Magdalena Kolesnik as fitness trainer Sylwia Zajac, whose situation is much more unenviable than her painted-on smile would have you believe.

It is the contradiction of making an unhurried, cinematic film centred on the chaotic experience of existing in a digital world that makes von Horn’s film a distinctly compelling watch.