Starring: Magdalena Koleśnik, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Aleksandra Konieczna
Directed by: Magnus von Horn
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Magnus von Horn is the outsider par excellence in Polish cinema. A Swedish filmmaker brought up at the Lódź Film School, the real local hotbed for talented filmmakers, is all but an everyday thing. This talented odd one out with great chance of success outside Poland debuted with the drama The Here After (2015) that earned him a “troop” of Golden Lions at the Gdynia Film Festival. Von Horn was twice an outsider when he began working on his second film: once as an outlander in Polish film industry, and once as a stranger to the dubious world of influencers dominating social media.
After an immersive opening sequence that suggests how shopping malls became like a second church for many individual in post-communist Poland, Sweat plunges the viewer into 3 days of the life of fitness coach Sylwia (Magdalena Koleśnik) who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The relationship that she has with her family is not idyllic and she longs for being an ordinary girl capable of loving and being loved away from the spotlight. Sylwia’s painstaking and somehow idealistic challenge to be the same person online and offline is complicated by the sudden appearance of Fryderyk (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who starts stalking the girl.
Koleśnik, who did not use Instagram before this film, trained four times a week for a year to fit the role. The exuberance from every pore that she displays in front of the camera in Sweat would be sufficient to fill up two full length feature movies. Zamachowski’s rendition of a disturbed and anguished character is equally admirable − Fryderyk seems to come out straight from an episode of Kieślowski’s Dekalog.
Sylwia’s thirst for sincerity, in spite of everything, is the main plot driver in von Horn’s somewhat simplistic but packed with adrenaline one-hander. While there is no ground to label Sweat as a sophomore slump, von Horn could have gone over the argument that social influencers can have a very complex inner life just like anybody else. For the second time in his career, the promising Swedish director stockpiled several Golden Lions in Gdynia.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on August 24, 2021