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“This whole affair stinks of a bad TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt over her recounting of what happened, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were likely more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes consist of a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling false 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 partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, for now.