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“The entire situation smells like a cheap 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 outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) 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 most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers some early mystery, as returning writer-director the director picks up with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a device-obsessed influencer in a place with no technology to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her version of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows 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 preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, as Madison and CW both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were likely more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even as many scenes involve a relatively small cast of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, 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, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them further. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.