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“This whole affair stinks like a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be compared to much of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. 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), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the preferential treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of what happened, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to posh places at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding stunning locations to film, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the film seems to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even when numerous sequences consist of a handful of actors of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display large spending, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' 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 screed against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it can be satisfying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence 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 a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.