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“The entire situation stinks of a cheap TV movie,” remarks a cynical commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. Yet his assessment of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed influencer in a place with no technology to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Then again, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as 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 over the years: Indeed, big action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much 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 emptiness of online fame. While it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means 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 brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations 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.