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“The entire situation smells like a bad made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two films on demand about a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers remains how much better it is compared to much of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and covers up those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that a person ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted influencer in a place with no technology and see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears especially custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking outfits.) Although the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off large spending, however just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of online fame. Though it is satisfying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is particularly evident of the way he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, for now.