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“The entire situation smells like a bad made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical podcaster midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose bizarre tale he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about 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 network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted influencer somewhere without any devices to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces doubt over her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, which seems especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original 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 an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to posh places at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to film, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. The vast majority of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display a big budget, however just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards which don't feature this much aerial pool footage. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it can be gratifying to see CW manipulate 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 major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he is selling 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 partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim by it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers 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’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.