Sweet Touch

Existing as a woman on the internet isn’t a joke or a dystopian nightmare – validation from a sea of strangers and a sense of deep loneliness can coexist. Sweat knows this – and treats its subject, and all those who relate to it, with deep empathy. Emily Maskell looks beyond the 4:5 Instagram frame to find out more.

“It would just take one click and everything would disappear,” Sylwia (Magdalena Koleśnik) fantasises, her piercing blue eyes sparkling at the very idea of deleting herself from the internet without a trace. But while preparing to leave her regular coffee shop, she takes a selfie like it’s a force of habit – so maybe she’s not quite ready to discard Instagram just yet. Sweat, director Magnus von Horn’s tale of influencer culture, roots itself in the lonely individual anxieties of this fitness social media influencer, tied up in her relationship with herself, her phone, and her fans with whom she shares her life.

In the 72 hours spent with Sylwia, Sweat uncovers a cruel irony: hundreds of thousands of people willing to watch your life cannot heal the heartbreaking loneliness of living without companionship. Lingering with Sylwia when she puts down her phone and life continues beyond the confines of the app’s 4:5 aspect ratio, the poignantly mournful character study of isolation in the modern age captures online life through a tenderly human lens.

Sweat attentively spotlights the pervasiveness of Sylwia’s solitude from its first moments. The camera sits in the passenger seat as she drives home from a workout class. Singing as the sun shines, she’s utterly carefree. Then, her front door shuts behind her and she is greeted by resounding silence. She’s alone. Again. Her scintillating smile slips from her lips like a bead of sweat from her face. Unable to stand the loneliness, she’s immediately back on Instagram Live, sharing a recipe for an almond banana milkshake. Then, while her blender whirs, she reaches for her laptop. Another device, another distraction.

With no friends or lovers to echo the encouraging sentiments she broadcasts to her followers, Sweat’s depiction of Sylwia’s remote personal existence is distinctly sympathetic. “This video will be a little bit different than usual,” her tearful viral vlog begins. “I’d really like to have someone close. Someone who would take my hand and say ‘Sylwia, my love, everything’s going to be alright.’” The screen has become a soul-baring mirror and, for Sylwia, witnessing a brutally honest version of herself pouring out her heart to anyone who will listen goes beyond candour – it feels like desperation. The distinction between Sylwia’s public and private has become nonexistent.

Sweat closely monitors Koleśnik’s frenetic performance, conveying Sylwia’s dichotomy of deep self-doubt and apparent confidence. She sits distant at the end of the table during a family gathering, her head propped on her hand as if forcing her attention not to wane. Her vacant stare and closed-off demeanour persist as the celebratory dinner continues. While an earnest conversation about Sylwia’s career begins, she’s used to reeling off easy answers to the usual questions but no one asks about her. The table’s attention becomes absorbed by Sylwia’s latest workout DVD and, like her followers, her family would rather stare at her on a screen than speak to her in real life. Sylwia’s sense of disassociation continues at a swarming, neon-saturated influencer party where she disappears into the crowd completely unnoticed. Her ongoing solitude is only soothed as she reaches for her phone, a lifeline allowing her to escape to a world she has mediated control of. Repeatedly, Sylwia favours the online world as a place she can initiate and, to some degree, restrict her interaction with others. But the instant gratification of praise from strangers only validates her oversharing.

While Sylwia shares empowering messages of self-love to hundreds of thousands of people online, she fails to receive any support herself. Happy to entertain the parasocial relationship with adoring fans in this echo chamber, Sylwia’s safety net collapses with the advent of a stalker. Already rattled after chasing him out of her apartment car park for masturbating in public, Sylwia becomes increasingly disturbed after seeing he has tagged her in a video on Instagram. His tearful self-loathing apology topples from Sylwia’s speakers, as if he were in the room with her. The invasive presence of Sylwia’s stalker on her screen, although pixelated, is still viscerally frightening. The sequence is excruciatingly long, underscored by a prickly, haunting score heightening the suddenly claustrophobic atmosphere. The fast-paced world of endless scrolling halts, as Sylwia is once again glued to the screen – but this time, it is terror that prevents her from looking away. 

The baseline condition of being a woman on the internet insinuates you will receive unsolicited messages. Demonstrating how invasive this one-sided connection can be, Sweat understands the cycles of harassment that exist both on the street and, now through screens, in Sylwia’s own home. These moments of personal catastrophe prompt Sylwia’s self-destructive desire to delete herself from online existence and simply fade into irrelevance – and perhaps, normality. Learning to appreciate a disconnected silence may be the peaceful, self-sustaining future Sylwia craves.

Joining a canon of films depicting online life as a woman with intimate poignancy, (think Ingrid Goes West and Eighth Grade), Sweat never reduces Sylwia’s habits to narcissism or ditziness. The film is a rightfully complex distillation of having a life on the internet, the real-life repercussions of such an existence. Entertaining and thoughtful, Sweat’s charting of online and offline, overwhelm and loneliness, offers a sensitively authentic depiction of a digital existence. Aware of a cultural moment still unravelling, Sweat’s approach to the frenzied realities of the online world is, most importantly, personal.