🔗 Share this article

“Everything about this stinks of a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers is how much better it is compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place with no technology and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the special treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion regarding her version of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of rival investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to posh places at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the movie seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it can be gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem as if he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, for now.