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“Everything about this stinks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he once said he trusted. But his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers is just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place without any devices and see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of the events, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the follow-up's screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the isolation Madison experienced while on ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, for now.