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“The entire situation reeks of a bad TV movie,” remarks a cynical commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it is compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to Diane that a person should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology and see if they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating stunning locations to film, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, but just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also seems deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. These individuals must believably inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see 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. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action 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 through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. 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 might give devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from seeming like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.