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“The entire situation reeks of a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers is just how superior it proves to be compared to much of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film 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 on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of the events, including the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to film, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the film appears to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the emptiness of online fame. While it is satisfying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she evades capture, Harder is somewhat understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.