🔗 Share this article

“Everything about this stinks of a cheap TV movie,” observes an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his description of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of films on demand about a woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that someone ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt regarding her recounting of what happened, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore posh places without paying much, an ability 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 visit, though they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can show off large spending, however just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids 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, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.