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“Everything about this reeks like a bad TV movie,” states a cynical commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is just how superior it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director the director resumes with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to Diane that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt regarding her version of the events, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a story of rival amateur detectives, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase or evade each other. Of course, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to posh places at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were likely more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that remains even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent for decades: Yes, big action and special effects can show off a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she evades capture, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly 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 doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting 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 other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident of the way he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.