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“This whole affair stinks of a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director resumes with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the special treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion regarding her version of what happened, including the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival investigators, with both women employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to posh places without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of people looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, big action and visual effects can show off large spending, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers that don’t show off this much aerial pool footage. The characters must believably occupy these lush, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently everyone — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. While it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat understanding of the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt while on ostensibly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his true devotion to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a polished Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from coming across like utter horror. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.