🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair stinks of a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, two films on demand chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

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

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

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her recounting of what happened, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward 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 fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore posh places without paying much, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. The vast majority of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a handful of actors of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is satisfying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the isolation Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer devotees of the original hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.