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“The entire situation smells like a bad made-for-TV,” states a cynical podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology to see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her recounting of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that typically capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of rival investigators, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that remains even as many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, big action and special effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems 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.

Every character in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film might give devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.