🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. But his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures 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 marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW happily living 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 ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology to see whether they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding 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 half of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to posh places without paying much, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to visit, although they were likely less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much aerial pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced while on supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, for now.