The Horror Follow-Up <em>Influencers</em> Is Set to Give Competing Digital Suspense Films Serious FOMO

“The entire situation stinks of a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, his tone is manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he once said he trusted. Yet his description of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, two streaming movies about a woman who worms her way into the lives of social media stars and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It’s the kind of thriller that should give its peers a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and conceals those deaths (for a time) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off 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 mystery, when returning filmmaker Kurtis David Harder resumes with the character CW happily living alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking their one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and ire.

CW comments to her partner that a person should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality somewhere without any devices to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing a backstory prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to one clout-chaser?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The narrative viewpoint shifts several more times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion over her version of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to boost his profile as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple alongside Ariana (Veronica Long), although his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a story of dueling investigators, with both women both use fake accounts, social media surveillance, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase and/or escape one another. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to posh places without paying much, an ability which CW mirrors through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Visual Wanderlust

The creative team for Influencers seem similarly ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, although they were likely less nefarious about it. Most of the film seems to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even when numerous sequences consist of a relatively small cast of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, 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 especially fitting for a story so rooted in the coexisting surface-level allure and desperate hustle involved in producing jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters in Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the first film, seem to have access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; films exist about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how often each person — including the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Digital-Age Suspense

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of the influencer industry. While it can be gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification lets us to wish she evades capture, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the isolation Madison felt while on ostensibly dream getaways. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other gullible men; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a degree of respect through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them further. This is especially true of the way he brings AI into the story, an intriguing development that lacks the psychological edge it should have. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the movie does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably chaotic climax. However, initially, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than a wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what keeps 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 remains present, for now.