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“The entire situation smells of a bad made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to Diane that a person ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces doubt regarding her recounting of the events, including the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — 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 Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. Though it is satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it resembles more a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.