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“Everything about this smells of a bad TV movie,” observes an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his assessment of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, two streaming movies about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers is how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller that should give its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone should try leaving a phone-addicted influencer in a place with no technology and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt over her version of the events, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow 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 involves masculine-focused livestreams, as opposed to the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears especially custom-fit for her talents. (She also designed CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scamming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate 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 handful of actors 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, explosive action and special effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much aerial pool video. The characters have to convincingly occupy these lush, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nevertheless devotes much time under the light of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during supposedly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without investigating them further. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn that lacks the psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title for the film could offer devotees of the original hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of real-world locations might also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.