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“The entire situation stinks like a bad TV movie,” observes an opportunistic podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose bizarre tale he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers is just how superior it proves to be than plenty of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early mystery, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that a person should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see whether they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to boost his profile as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of rival investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a handful of actors of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it is gratifying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, 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, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.