🔗 Share this article

“Everything about this reeks of a bad TV movie,” states a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains just how superior it is compared to much of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology to see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her version of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were likely less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it can be gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.