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“Everything about this stinks of a cheap made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their doom, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces doubt regarding her version of the events, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, although they were likely more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even as many scenes involve a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ 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 rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. Though it is satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.