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“This whole affair smells like a bad made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

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

CW remarks to Diane that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a story of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool video. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it is satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. However, initially, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.