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“This whole affair stinks like a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical podcaster during the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect 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 bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer in a place without any devices and see if they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion over her version of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying 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, rather than the Instagram photos that normally capture CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a story of dueling 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 vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. The vast majority of the film seems to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a story so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it is gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he resists turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. The world might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.