INSTA GRATIFICATION
SWEAT 1… 2… 3… Come on! Three manic days in the life of a fitness influencer.
I Back in 2015, Magnus von Horn started following a fitness coach on Snapchat. Already a fan of reality TV, the Swedish director (The Here After) immediately began to get interested in the world of elite influencers. “What I liked about them was that they were at a level where they posted so much that they had, in a way, stopped thinking about [it in] a strategic way – what does this say about me? They just posted. That’s what you need to be to be a good influencer. You can’t just be correcting yourself.”
The result of all this cyber-musing is Sweat, which explores three days in the life of Sylwia (Magdalena Kolesnik), a fitness influencer who has more than 600,000 followers on Instagram. When we first meet her, she’s in a shopping mall, leading an in-person event for her hysterical fans. Von Horn went to similar real-life shows, even queueing up for selfies with these motivational gurus. “I wanted to see what it’s like,” he says. “The ones I saw for real were more extreme [than in the film]. Bigger energy, even crazier.”
While Sylwia is not afraid of putting her life out there (a teary post about her lonely life goes viral), there are
consequences – not least the attentions of an obsessive fan (Tomasz Orpinski). Albeit in a symbolic way, von Horn empathised with the stalker, even giving him a Swedish Volvo car as a selfreferential nod. “I’m very passive on social media, I’m completely unable to post like they do so spontaneously. And I felt like a part of me was a bit jealous… so, yeah, I feel like I am the stalker!”
If all this shows that Sweat is not a film where its protagonist is judged or mocked for her daily digital updates, that is further emphasised via the fully committed performance of Kolesnik, a former theatre actress who spent over a year preparing for the role. Working out like crazy, she even started up her own private Instagram account to share things with von Horn in character. “We wanted to merge Magda and Sylwia into one,” he says, “[to find] where do we meet each other?”
Now planning a period horror-drama, von Horn has plenty to do, but has his Instagram habit lessened since Sweat finished? “I wish I was doing it less,” he sighs. “Every Monday I see my screen time is up six per cent. I’ve stopped caring a bit. I don’t have a TV at home. So I consider my Instagram a kind of TV – a way to cut off or to not think. And what is being fed to you… it’s like an algorithm that is your guilty pleasure. That’s who you are!”
ETA | 25 JUNE / SWEAT OPENS NEXT MONTH.