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

“This whole affair reeks of a cheap TV movie,” states a cynical commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, his tone is dismissive in a calculated way toward an interviewee whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. Yet his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a woman who insinuates herself into the worlds of social media stars before killing them feels like a modern-day version of a lurid but network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers remains how much better it is than plenty of the competition, regardless of screen size. It is precisely the suspense film capable of giving its peers a bad case of FOMO.

Recapping the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their online accounts. The film concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island near the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles against her.

This provides 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as 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 their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW comments to Diane that someone should try leaving a device-obsessed influencer in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment afforded one fame-seeker?

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 committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion regarding her recounting of the events, which includes the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to boost his profile as half of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, which seems especially custom-fit to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) While the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a story of rival amateur detectives, with both women employ fabricated profiles, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to chase or evade one another. Then again, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Influencers have a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales at little cost, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Ingenious Filmmaking and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally resourceful in locating beautiful places to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate about it. The vast majority of the movie appears to be filmed in real places, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when many scenes involve a relatively small cast of people looking at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so persistently lavish over the years: Yes, explosive action and visual effects can display large spending, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also seems inherently cinematic. This is particularly appropriate for a narrative so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, like those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy access to unbelievably stylish modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' narcissistic falseness — nevertheless spends plenty of time under the light of their devices.

Nuanced Portrayals and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, the director has not crafted a rant against the emptiness of online fame. While it can be satisfying to watch CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that merely watching Jacob in action will make it clear that he is selling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his partner; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited of it.

The flip side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation means it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at bits of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he brings AI into the plot, an intriguing development that lacks the psychosexual kick it deserves. The pluralized title for the film could offer fans of the first movie expectations of a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide that, with an appropriately wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than a frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with always-online creators, online fraud, and self-serving tourism, but reality itself remains present, at least for now.