🔗 Share this article

“The entire situation smells of a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early mystery, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality in a place with no technology to see whether they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of the events, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems especially custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, as Madison and CW both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade each other. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to visit, although they were likely more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, however simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly dream getaways. In this film, 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 avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.