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“The entire situation reeks like a cheap made-for-TV,” observes a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Setting the Stage

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

This provides the 2025 Influencers some early mystery, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality somewhere without any devices to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt regarding her version of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that typically capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a story of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to posh places without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when numerous sequences consist of a handful of actors of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much aerial pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the movie does eventually provide that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, tech-addled 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 might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.