Sweat

Directed by Magnus von Horn

Running time: 1hr46 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Magdalena Kolesnik stars in Sweat

If you’ve watched more than your share of formulaic films lately, Sweat may come as a welcome workout for a different set of viewing muscles. It keeps you off balance. You can tell it hasn’t been workshopped by a committee intent on delivering an easily digested emotional journey or foreseeable third act twist. Nor is it a cute metaphorical film where some troubling aspect of modern-day society figures as an unambiguous larger-than-life villain. And it’s not part of the genre-tribute genre either; there are no deliberate hits of warm recognition based on stylistic or aesthetic references to older films or television.

So much for what it isn’t - what is it? It’s a subtle, original, unpredictable, fully-realised portrait of a fitness influencer (somebody whose career consists of portraying a character closely aligned with themselves, on Instagram, in exchange for sponsorship and product placement deals). This is a canny and unusual choice. This person is not somebody we’re used to taking seriously, at face value, as a potential protagonist in cinema. She is someone who is usually a joke or possibly a villain. Magdelena Kolesnik is perfectly cast. This is somebody you want to watch; there's something magnetic about her, however banal the activity she's engaged in might be. Whether she's making a protein shake, lifting weights or arriving at a red carpet event, she has true presence.

Social media is an engine fuelled by judgement, positive or negative (I agree with you, I don’t agree with you, this made me laugh, this made me angry, and so on). What can make cinema feel so slow by comparison, is that everything is at a remove; audience feedback is visible only to the rest of the audience (except for those rare circumstances where the creator is present at a screening), and does not take place in direct dialogue with the creator. To capture for cinema what it might be to have one’s livelihood depend on an instant audience, an immediate feedback loop, is something that eludes most filmmakers who try it, perhaps because of this difference between the way these media function. But Magnus von Horn bridges the gap, creating a portrait both intimate and alienated, sympathetic and surgical all at once. Like its central character, it’s a film at once accessible and elusive.

SWEAT (2020) Written by Magnus von Horn | Shot by Michal Dymek | Edited by Agnieszka Glinska

In cinemas now.