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“Everything about this smells like a bad made-for-TV,” observes a cynical podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two 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 Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early mystery, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to Diane that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the preferential treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of the events, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, though they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent for decades: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can show off large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character 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 this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets 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 experienced during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.