🔗 Share this article

“This whole affair smells of a bad made-for-TV,” observes a cynical podcaster midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it is compared to much of the competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of 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 marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted influencer somewhere without any devices and see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt over her version of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Then again, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself remains present, for now.