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“Everything about this reeks of a bad made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose bizarre tale he previously said he trusted. Yet his assessment of the events on screen isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers before killing them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it is compared to much of the competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their doom, and conceals those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, following her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning writer-director the director resumes with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and ire.

CW comments to Diane that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices to see if they can make it. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the special treatment given to one fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW’s crimes, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of what happened, which includes the killing of her boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though 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, a role that appears especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's eye-catching wardrobe.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase or evade each other. Then again, perhaps the vast resources isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales without paying much, a skill which CW mirrors with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly resourceful in locating beautiful places to film, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. 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 handful of actors of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish for decades: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off a big budget, however just providing a kind of visual tour to viewers also feels deeply filmic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous surface-level allure and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those staying in Thailand in the first film, seem to have entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably occupy these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — including the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. While it is gratifying to watch CW exploit various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt during supposedly dream getaways. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling false masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not a victim of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer devotees of the original expectations of a larger-scale escalation, and the film does eventually provide that, with a suitably chaotic climax. But before that, it’s more like a sleek Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but reality itself is still here, for now.