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“The entire situation smells like a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning filmmaker the director picks up with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that a person should try leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears especially custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature as much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it can be gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.