🔗 Share this article

“Everything about this reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states a cynical podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. But his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of films on demand about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of the events, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to posh places without paying much, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding stunning locations to film, though they were likely more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the film seems to be filmed in real places, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display large spending, however simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, for now.