Sweat

With her blond hair, shining features, and perfectly shaped body, Sylwia (magnetic rising star Magdalena Koleśnik) could be the Platonic ideal of a fitness instructor. And with 600,000 Instagram followers, this influencer would seem to be on the road to having it all. But all is not well in the land of the selfie—Sylwia may have thousands of followers, but she has zero friends. Director Magnus von Horn’s character-driven drama, which seems to offer itself up as a textbook case of satire of the world of the ‘extremely online’, takes a turn into darker corners and is all the better for it. And Koleśnik marks herself as one to watch: she’s fantastic. ‘Poised, impressive… A tricky blend of satire and tragedy… With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun—yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface… A stage actor seizing her first film lead with both crisply manicured hands, Koleśnik has evident fun enacting the vapidity and manic physicality of Sylwia’s public persona, without tilting into caricature: The performance is most remarkable in its fine, near-seamless transitions from cultivated personal melodrama to painfully felt emotion.’—Guy Lodge, Variety