🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair reeks of a bad made-for-TV,” states a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place with no technology and see if they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt over her version of the events, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that normally capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to posh places 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 ingenious about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were likely more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of characters looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can show off large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. 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 visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively understanding of the major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even gives 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 a victim by it.

The other 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 regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, for now.