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“Everything about this reeks of a bad made-for-TV,” observes a cynical podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, two streaming movies about a woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try leaving a phone-addicted influencer in a place without any devices to see whether they can survive. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt regarding her version of what happened, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of rival amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the movie seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes involve a relatively small cast of people looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly occupy these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it can be satisfying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling false masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.