🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair reeks like a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of films on demand about a 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 Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it is compared to much of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted online personality somewhere without any devices to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of the events, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of rival investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were presumably less nefarious about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off large spending, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it can be satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging bits 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 retitled sequel for the film might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.