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“This whole affair stinks of a bad made-for-TV,” remarks an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. But his assessment of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, two streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers is just how superior it is compared to much of the competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller capable of giving its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone influencer targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their socials. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place with no technology to see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her version of what happened, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of rival amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film seems to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of characters staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies appear so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and special effects can display large spending, but just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the movie ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, for now.