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“This whole affair stinks of a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of the 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 Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that normally capture 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 wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels 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 staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. These individuals must believably occupy these lush, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the vacuousness of online fame. Though it is satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. 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.