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“This whole affair reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give 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 solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place with no technology and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the murder 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 alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically capture CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display large spending, but simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem that 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 psychological edge it should have. 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 exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.