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“The entire situation reeks of a bad made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to Diane that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt over her recounting of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) Although the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the film seems to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of people staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off large spending, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, for now.