This Thriller Follow-Up <em>Influencers</em> Will Give Other Streaming Suspense Films Serious FOMO

“This whole affair smells like a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is manipulatively dismissive toward an interviewee with an outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. Yet his description of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, two streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of online influencers before killing them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry yet cable-ready Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains just how superior it is compared to much of the competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the thriller that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their doom, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends the 2025 Influencers a degree of ambiguity, when returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with the character CW contentedly residing with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey marking the couple’s one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW's attention and anger.

CW comments to her partner that someone ought to attempt leaving a phone-addicted online personality somewhere with no technology to see if they can make it. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, ultimately revealing those introductory moments' chronological position. The story revisits Madison, who has been exonerated for carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her version of what happened, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a right-wing-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that typically capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of dueling amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget to pursue or evade each other. Then again, maybe the vast resources isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, an ability which CW mirrors with her more overt scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Visual Wanderlust

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to film, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that remains even as many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at digital devices.

It’s the same principle which allowed the Bond franchise look so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, big action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a kind of visual tour for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing online content.

Every character in Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman wreaking vengeance upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, the director has not crafted a rant against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it can be gratifying to watch CW manipulate different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she doesn’t get caught, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the isolation Madison experienced during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob in action will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, but Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he is acknowledging elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is particularly evident of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the story, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie expectations of an Aliens-style escalation, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, tech-addled Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places may also be what keeps it from seeming like pure nightmare fuel. Our society may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself is still here, at least for now.