🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair smells like a bad TV movie,” states a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology to see whether they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile 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 normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, which seems especially custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places without paying much, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a story so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it can be satisfying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced while on ostensibly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give devotees of the original hope for 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’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.