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“This whole affair stinks of a bad TV movie,” remarks an opportunistic commentator midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an bizarre tale he once said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of streaming movies chronicling a woman who worms her way into the worlds of social media stars and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and conceals those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their online accounts. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to Diane that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted online personality somewhere without any devices and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist after witnessing the preferential treatment afforded one clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters doubt regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still functions as a tale of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, though they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the movie seems to be filmed in real places, providing it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a relatively small cast of people staring at digital devices.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, explosive action and special effects can display large spending, however just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy entry to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature as much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it is satisfying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment lets us to hope she evades capture, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The retitled sequel of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an frenzied, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations might also be what prevents it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, for now.