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“Everything about this smells of a cheap TV movie,” observes a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose bizarre tale he once claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers some early mystery, when returning filmmaker the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to Diane that a person ought to attempt leaving a device-obsessed influencer somewhere without any devices to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion regarding her version of what happened, including the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the curated images that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a handful of actors of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can show off large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how often everyone — including the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a screed targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it can be gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he tapped into the isolation Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it can sometimes appear that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, at least for now.