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“Everything about this smells of a bad TV movie,” remarks a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its 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 Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that a person should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices to see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt over her version of the events, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore posh places at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, although they were presumably less nefarious about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that remains even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise look so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it can be gratifying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly dream getaways. In this film, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting 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 this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.