🔗 Share this article

“The entire situation smells like a bad made-for-TV,” states a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand about a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to Diane that a person ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her version of what happened, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of rival investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape one another. Then again, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display large spending, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. The characters must believably occupy these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is satisfying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. However, initially, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.