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“Everything about this stinks of a cheap made-for-TV,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

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

CW remarks to Diane that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow 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 terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Then again, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of people staring 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 special effects can show off large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently everyone — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development which misses 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 ultimately delivers that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.