Sweat weighs up the emotional cost of physical excellence

► Sweat is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 25 June.

In Sweat, the Swedish director Magnus von Horn faces the dilemma of how to make fresh a topic that most viewers are overly familiar with – mainly, how social media creates an alternative reality, smoothing over darker truths and torments.

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.

Magdalena Kolesnik plays Sylwia Zajac, a svelte fitness influencer who draws crowds to shopping malls for group motivational workouts and keeps up a steady grind of Instagram posts to help her followers stay fit. Like many influencers, Sylwia uses her social media streams deliberately to collate her public and private persona, turning her downtime into carefully prepared, easily digestible bites.

The perks naturally come with caveats: Sylwia’s ultra-modern apartment and comfy lifestyle also mean that her every step is tied to marketing of fitness and health products. Her patrons dictate what image of her sells best, a pressure under which Sylwia is clearly cracking. To this end, the film’s opening sequence is a study of rhythmic contrasts: from the heat and mad tempo of the workout to the cooler, deflated, almost blasé exchange that Sylwia and her fitness partner, Klaudiusz (Julian Swiezewski), have backstage.

Michal Dymek’s cinematography is mostly crisp and lucid, with the camera staying close to Sylwia, as if poised to catch her every fidget and pang. Such proximity may also be the movie’s weakest point: Kolesnik is intensely watchable, but ultimately too stoic to fully draw us in. To be sure, this is in keeping with Sylwia’s reserved personality, her inclination to hide rather than reveal, to speak in clipped sentences and affect a frosty tone when challenged.

Sylwia’s loneliness is framed in the early scenes, particularly when she gladly retreats from the limelight to the darkness and privacy of her bedroom, to cuddle with her dog while watching tennis on television, rather than go to a party.

In her public life, Sylwia’s haunted by a video that’s gone viral, in which she has confessed her sadness about being single. This thread segues to the movie’s emotional core: Sylwia discovers that a mysterious man suffering from psychological problems masturbates in his car in front of her building. Appalled, she has Klaudiusz attack the man but then, on seeing the viciousness of the attack, repents. The way that Sylwia eventually brings herself to empathise with the man’s isolation, and to suffer guilt for having put him in harm’s way, is the movie’s most unsettling and continuously intriguing element.

The movie’s other narrative turns, in von Horn’s screenplay, are more pedestrian. There’s the build-up to Sylwia’s appearance on an influential morning television show, a spot she’s been doggedly fighting for, and her visit home for her mother’s birthday. The latter brings Sylwia out of her urban shell into small-town Poland. While it’s in many ways a fiasco – a confrontation scene proves too brief to do more than scratch the surface of the reasons why mother and daughter can only interact in such abrasive, wounding ways – von Horn strains to cast the former event as Sylwia’s ultimate moral victory.

After some nightmarish events, in which Sylwia fails to find a point of connection with Klaudiusz (whose sexual ruthlessness turns out to be outright obscene), and finds herself helping her stalker to reach a hospital, Sylwia finally emerges on television the next day, a bit lustreless but quickly finding her natural media glow. She declares that she’s found her way: she can be weak or pathetic, as she puts it, or stand up for the weak and pathetic, who are “the most beautiful people,” and so finally be herself. And yes, she will do a workout. Whether viewers will be swayed by such patness is certainly an open question, but Sweat does manage to introduce a few intriguing discomforts, before it rushes to blot them away.