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“The entire situation reeks like a bad TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously said he trusted. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn't inaccurate. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the lives of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is just how superior it is compared to much of the 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 tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The film 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 against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to Diane that someone should try leaving a phone-addicted online personality in a place without any devices to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her recounting of what happened, 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), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Then again, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to posh places at little cost, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful about finding stunning locations to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the film appears to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even as many scenes involve a relatively small cast of characters staring at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the James Bond movies appear so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it can be gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.