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“The entire situation smells of a cheap made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a lurid yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see if they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her version of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically capture CW's interest.

The actor continues to be immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase or evade each other. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, an ability that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were presumably less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. These individuals have to convincingly occupy these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often everyone — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, for now.