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“The entire situation reeks of a cheap TV movie,” observes a cynical commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, two films on demand about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready Movie of the Week. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. 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) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker the director picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality in a place with no technology to see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized after witnessing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her version of what happened, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, a role that appears particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Then again, maybe the vast resources aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales 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 ingenious about finding beautiful places to film, though they were likely less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the movie seems to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes consist of a handful of actors of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off large spending, but just providing a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently everyone — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident 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 degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them. This is particularly evident regarding how he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give devotees of the original hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations may also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.