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“This whole affair stinks like a bad made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it is compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their doom, and covers up those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place with no technology to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint 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 offenses, but still faces doubt over her version of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) 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 rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding beautiful places to film, although they were likely more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the film appears to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it can be satisfying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, Harder is somewhat understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence 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 hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, for now.