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“The entire situation stinks of a cheap TV movie,” observes a cynical podcaster during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to Diane that a person should try leaving a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her recounting 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 part of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to pursue or evade each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to visit, though they were likely more legitimate about it. Most of the movie seems to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes consist of a handful of actors of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can display large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to 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 this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it can be gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, for now.