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“Everything about this smells like a bad made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic podcaster midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted online personality in a place with no technology and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

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 exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her version of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape one another. Then again, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, however simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.