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“This whole affair stinks like a cheap made-for-TV,” observes a cynical commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, two films on demand about a woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place with no technology to see whether they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her recounting of what happened, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade each other. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can show off large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it is gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.