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“This whole affair reeks of a bad TV movie,” states a cynical commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand chronicling a woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for 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 and trying to boost his profile as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding beautiful places to film, although they were likely more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, but just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly occupy these lush, 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 under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the emptiness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.