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“The entire situation smells of a bad TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of films on demand about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their doom, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early mystery, as returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology and see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion regarding her version of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to visit, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film appears to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

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 a big budget, but just providing a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it is gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, for now.