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“This whole affair smells like a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the lives of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

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

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted influencer somewhere without any devices to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her version of the events, including the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as half of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally capture CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, which seems especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a story of dueling investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as many scenes consist of a handful of actors of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, big action and special effects can display large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.