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“This whole affair smells of a bad TV movie,” states an opportunistic commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing about 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 bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director the director picks up with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase or evade each other. Then again, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, though they were presumably less nefarious about it. Most of the film seems to be filmed in real places, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes consist of a handful of actors of people staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent for decades: Yes, big action and special effects can display large spending, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.