🔗 Share this article

“Everything about this reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he previously claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

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

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices and see whether they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, although they were likely more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as many scenes involve a handful of actors of people staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display large spending, however just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it can be satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is particularly evident of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.