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“This whole affair reeks of a bad TV movie,” observes a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is just how superior it proves to be compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of what happened, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains 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 leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, though they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, however simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much aerial pool video. The characters have to convincingly occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach 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 brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.