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“This whole affair stinks like a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near 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 mystery, as returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their one-year 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 influencer in a place with no technology to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the special treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her version of the events, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a story of rival investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape each other. Then again, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, although they were likely less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can show off large spending, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards which don't feature as much aerial pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is satisfying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.