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“The entire situation reeks like a bad made-for-TV,” observes a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he once said he trusted. But his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers some early mystery, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted influencer somewhere with no technology and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt over her version of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival amateur detectives, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise look so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display large spending, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers could offer devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.