🔗 Share this article

“The entire situation reeks like a bad TV movie,” states a cynical commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of what’s happening in the movie 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 feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film leaves off (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 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place with no technology to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple 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, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, though they were likely more legitimate about it. Most of the movie seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even as many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much aerial pool video. The characters must believably occupy these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of online fame. Though it is gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat understanding of the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.