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“Everything about this smells of a bad TV movie,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. Yet his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is just how superior it proves to be compared to much of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place without any devices and see whether they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as many scenes involve a relatively small cast of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off large spending, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false 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 is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film might give fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, for now.