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“This whole affair reeks of a bad made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director picks up with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to Diane that someone ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place without any devices to see if they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

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 offenses, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of what happened, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding stunning locations to film, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even when numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature as much aerial pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, for now.