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“The entire situation smells like a bad made-for-TV,” observes a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he once claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. Superficially, two films on demand chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is compared to much of the competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends 2025's 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. On a journey marking the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see whether they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the special treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt over her version of what happened, including the murder 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 chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Then again, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating stunning locations to film, though they were presumably less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those staying 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 aerial pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a screed against the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is somewhat understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title 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 a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.