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“The entire situation stinks of a bad TV movie,” observes a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, two films on demand about a woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director the director resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to Diane that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see whether they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

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 regarding her version of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, which seems especially tailor-made for her talents. (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 dueling investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were likely less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off large spending, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it can be gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, for now.