Magnus von Horn is an up-and-coming Swedish director who studied in Poland which explains why he has made a Polish film about the life of a social media influencer. This is of course a very hip subject and it might be easy to imagine what direction such a film might take. Yet this film continually surprised me with its choices. I’m not sure that it’s all good and plenty of the problems experienced by the protagonist are unrelated to her being an influencer. But it is well made and intriguing and that’s enough to win von Horn plenty of fans among the critics.

Sylvia Zajac is a successful fitness influencer who tells everyone who asks that she has 600k followers. She is especially popular as a source of motivation and inspiration to other women and leads them on group exercise sessions in public places. Yet she is lonely in her personal life and has no one apart from her dog Jackson. When she expresses this frustration in an especially heartfelt post on social media, a sponsor complains that this is too personal. She also realizes that this confession has attracted a stalker who keeps watching her from outside her apartment building and sends her messages about how he too is lonely. We later learn that some of her frustration comes from the fact that her mother, after being single for a long time, is now in a serious relationship with a new boyfriend. At her mother’s birthday party with many other guests, Sylvia grabs the spotlight from her mother due to her growing fame. In return when Sylvia relates the story of her stalker, her mother dismisses her for over-reacting.

This film is an odd one because so much of it points in an obvious direction. Being an influencer is time-consuming work and so we see Sylvia constantly filming herself with her phone, documenting every piece of her life for her fans and to fulfil her product endorsement obligations. She affects a positive, cheery personality both on camera and when she meets fans in public who recognize her. She works hard to look good and be fit and even tries to enforce the ethical standards that are reflected in her public image, berating a food delivery company that uses too much plastic in their packaging. Understandably this film wants to show that such public personalities have emotional turmoil and personal problems of their own but unlike what you might expect, it doesn’t really berate Sylvia for being a fake. It is rather the opposite as the film wants the audience to sympathize with Sylvia and wants to argue that she is so popular as an influencer precisely because she is so authentic and airs her true emotions and problems to the public. Give that most people would think of influencers as being fake, this is indeed a surprisingly sympathetic take.

One problem with making a film about the mundane problems that even influencers have is that they are mundane problems that have nothing to do with the world of social media. Sylvia’s resentment at her mother getting a boyfriend is relatable but also a problem that anyone can have. The character of Sylvia also occupies what I think is an in-between space in which she is famous and successful enough to be recognized on the street and be invited onto a national television show. But she is not yet so successful as to be constantly accompanied by an entourage of assistants which is why she has to deal with many mundane errands on her own. This gives rise to the impression that while the film is solidly made, it’s also not distinctive in any particular way and is only weakly about its purported subject of influencers. It’s best point is that successful influencers mine every part of their personal lives to fuel their online popularity, spending of themselves so to speak. It can be eerie how Sylvia can instantly shift from being teary-eyed over her personal problems one moment and bright-eyed and eager to get on with her exercise routine the next. But the film doesn’t suggest that she is being inauthentic, it’s just a matter of fact pointing out that this is how things work.

Critics have pointed out that this is one of the first films about the influencer phenomenon and it stands out by not taking the low-hanging fruit of criticizing influencers as being inherently fake and shallow. Indeed it also goes out of the way to show that just as Sylvia has attracted a stalker who claims an unwarranted degree of familiarity with her, she also seems to have genuinely motivated and inspired other women. I’m not sure how well this film will hold up over time but I suppose it makes the good enough point that influencers are people like anyone else and social media is a tool like anything else so it all depends on who those people are and how social media is used.