“Sweat”, the irruption of reality in the digital life of an influencer

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

Sylwia is what is called an influencer. She teaches fitness to her thousands of social media followers. She stages, and online, her personal life and her moods. It is to a real product of the contemporary world that the Swedish filmmaker Magnus von Horn is attached. A creature whose existence has been made possible by the immediate and absolute connection that modern means of communication allow. This candid exhibitionism, engendered by an era of absolute emptiness and merchandise, between followers and sponsors, contributes to a process of derealization, to the illusion of a distance from any emotional or social roughness.

Most trivial impulse

By closely following his character throughout the film, Magnus von Horn’s camera observes a pure phenomenon of his time, which an incident will suddenly confront with the brutality of reality. Sylwia discovers that she is being followed by a stranger, permanently installed in her car parked in front of her house, and whom she sees masturbating, when she calls him out one morning.

The surge of the most trivial impulse, the way in which the heroine will try to get rid of the stalker while realizing the vacuity of her own sex life, and perhaps of a prohibitive absence of desire, constitute the marks of a truth that will only impose itself temporarily. Artifice and deceptive superficiality will ruthlessly take over.