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“The entire situation smells of a bad TV movie,” remarks an opportunistic podcaster midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case 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 social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place without any devices to see if they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film seems to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even as many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool video. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed against the emptiness of online fame. While it is satisfying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.