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“This whole affair reeks like a cheap TV movie,” observes an opportunistic commentator midway through the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way of a guest with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of what’s happening on screen isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those murders (for a time) by seizing control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, following her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, when returning writer-director the director picks up with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip marking their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed 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 fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for carrying out CW’s crimes, but still faces doubt regarding her version of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to boost his profile as half of a conservative-influencer duo alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the curated images that normally attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in the part, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the sequel’s focus tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers 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 appear so persistently lavish over the years: Indeed, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the coexisting surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

All of the characters in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the first film, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; films exist about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it can be satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced during ostensibly dream getaways. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other gullible men; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at elements of modern online life without investigating them further. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, tech-addled 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, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.