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“This whole affair smells like a bad made-for-TV,” remarks a cynical podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect regarding 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 other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director picks up with the character 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) draws CW's attention and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer somewhere with no technology and see whether they can make it. Is this a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters doubt over her recounting of the events, including the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to posh places at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt 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. The vast majority of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can display large spending, however just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless devotes much time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, 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 grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film could offer devotees of the original expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, for now.