Spoiler warning

My review contains spoilers. Please read at your own risk. Thank you for understanding.

Sylwia, the protagonist of Sweat, could live in Budapest or London or anywhere else in the world, it makes no difference that she is a Polish girl from Warsaw, nor does it make any difference that the director, Magnus von Horn, who is Swedish, but lives and works in Poland, presents the protagonist of his film as a fitness infuencer. Because although at first glance it might seem like another film about the downsides of social media and a critique of instagram stars, it later turns out that influencers are just a tool to show off that how bloody sad and miserably lonely everyone is.

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Emotional exhibitionists fascinate me, probably because I am on the opposite side of that spectrum

said the film's director, Magnus von Horn, who modelled his character Sylwia on real-life snapchat fitness influencers, in an interview quoted by CNN.

I couldn't stop watching fitness motivators and the way they made their lives into reality shows. I felt like I got to know them on some level because they shared so much of their everyday life. Twenty videos of a dog playing with a rubber toy and then an emotional speech about love problems. That's why I watched them. It was provocative, I both hated and loved them.

From pink sweats to sexual abuse

Based on the trailer, I was expecting this film, along with all the clichés I've heard twenty times before, to once again tell me how empty, walking advertisements for influencers are, that social media is just a nice, shiny window dressing. In fact, that's what we get in the first part of the film: a Cecília Rogán-looking Rubint Reka, mixed with Regina Dukai, jumping around a Warsaw mall, training in front of a small crowd who adore her, almost religiously, and feel it is the success of their lives to take a selfie with her. Sylwia, meanwhile, with her perfect figure, her hair in a perfect ponytail, her perfectly pink sports bra, throws out the usual meaningless phrases from influencers, talking about energy and self-acceptance, "work with the body you have, not the body you want", everyone sweating together, everyone loving everyone. But halfway through the film, the pink sweat turns into something far more horrific.

They give us a quick summary of what a typical influencer looks like, living with pink fingernails and a small dog in a newly built apartment in a housing estate, posting every ten minutes about how she uses the stairs instead of the lift, what kind of smoothie she makes with sponsor products or what giveaways she has received. It's a deadly bore, something that anyone who has ever clicked on the Instagram of any Hungarian celebrity has seen.

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Then it turns out that Sylvia is not only being watched by her 600,000 followers, but also by a man masturbating in a car parked outside her apartment.

The sometimes slightly documentary-style and handheld camera shots, the seemingly unjustified slow motion and the gloomy, cold colours meant that there was, up to that point, an inexplicable tension. However, after the masturbation scene, where a dose of dog shit is introduced, I kept expecting someone to unexpectedly attack the protagonist or for there to be some kind of accident. Eventually, something even worse happens, because when it seems that Sylwia finally gets rid of her stalker thanks to another man, the latter starts to behave in a way that is perhaps even more frightening and disgusting than the former. In a scene lasting a minute and a half, sexual abuse is presented in a way that is perhaps even more upsetting and slapping than if we had seen actual physical violence.

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Loneliness remains

And this is where the film starts to become, if not exciting, then interesting, however much the protagonist makes questionable decisions, and soon afterwards finds himself in another totally absurd situation with his first stalker. With a man who perfectly brings the misery of Central and Eastern Europe with his lethargy and obesity, sitting in his car at least thirty years old.

With a man who tells Sylvia that they are very much alike because they want the same thing: someone to hold their hands. It is impossible to tell from the protagonist's face whether she is afraid, sad, pitying or desperate, she is almost totally emotionless in the situation, but not only that, but also in all the other situations presented in the film that do not revolve around training or influenza. You don't know what he's thinking when he runs into an old classmate who, after a minute, blurts out the story of his miscarriage, only to ask for a selfie with him another minute later. The only time Sylwia feels anything remotely meaningful is when she gets into a fight with her mother on her birthday in an undersized apartment in a panel flat, where she brings an oversized TV as a present to show her own training video to the family, who throw homophobic remarks and the well-known phrases "drink more" and "I'm not out of cold cuts, eat more" at her.

Then, at the end of the film, when she is in tears in a TV studio about wanting to be "weak and pathetic" because "weak and pathetic people are the most beautiful", for a few minutes we think that the traumas she has suffered have finally torn something open in her, and that these are now real emotions, Sylwia turns in a tenth of a second to self-promotion and starts grinning and doing her morning workout. She doesn't reveal who she really is, what she thinks, what she feels. The loneliness of six hundred thousand followers remains.