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“The entire situation stinks of a bad made-for-TV,” states a cynical commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his assessment of the events in the movie isn't inaccurate. Superficially, two streaming movies about a young woman who worms her way into the lives of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing about Influencers is how much better it proves to be compared to much of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling influencer targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (for a time) by taking control of their socials. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that a person ought to attempt stranding a phone-addicted online personality in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt over her version 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 part of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore posh places without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to visit, although they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be shot on location, providing it a real-world weight that remains even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, big action and special effects can show off a big budget, but just providing a travelogue of sorts to viewers also feels deeply filmic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how often everyone — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless 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 emptiness of the influencer industry. While it is gratifying to see CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to wish she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give devotees of the original hope for an Aliens-style escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, for now.