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“The entire situation stinks of a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains just how superior it proves to be compared to much of the competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed influencer in a place without any devices and see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her version of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears especially custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Then again, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to posh places at little cost, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally 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, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.