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“Everything about this smells like a cheap made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his description of the events on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, two films on demand chronicling a young woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars and then murders them feels like a modern-day version of a tawdry but network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It is precisely the thriller capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed influencer somewhere with no technology and see whether they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her version of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as part of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that typically attract CW's interest.

The actor continues to be terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems particularly custom-fit for her talents. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful about finding stunning locations to visit, though they were presumably less nefarious in their methods. Most of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even as numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so persistently lavish for decades: Indeed, big action and visual effects can show off a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels deeply filmic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so rooted in the coexisting superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to unbelievably stylish contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it can be satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat understanding of the major influencer characters. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it can sometimes appear that he is acknowledging bits of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI 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 expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a frenzied, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but reality itself remains present, for now.