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“Everything about this reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (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 the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning filmmaker the director picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere 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?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion regarding her recounting of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival investigators, as Madison and CW employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even when many scenes involve a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can show off large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, for now.