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“The entire situation reeks of a cheap made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of films on demand about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere with no technology to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her version of what happened, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Then again, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters must believably occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem as if he is acknowledging elements of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it resembles more a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.