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“Everything about this stinks like a bad TV movie,” remarks an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that someone ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place without any devices and see whether they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt over her version of the events, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically capture CW's interest.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent 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 filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the film seems to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the emptiness of online fame. While it can be gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, 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 resists caricaturing the character. He even grants 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 a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, for now.