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“Everything about this stinks like a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of films on demand about a woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is how much better it is compared to much of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices to see whether they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt over her recounting of the events, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore posh places without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, 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 elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer devotees of the original hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.