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“The entire situation stinks of a bad made-for-TV,” states a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he previously claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, 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 lurid but network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers is just how superior it is compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller 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 quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer in a place without any devices to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were likely less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals must believably occupy these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.