This Horror Follow-Up <em>Influencers</em> Is Set to Give Competing Digital Suspense Films a Bad Case of FOMO

“This whole affair smells like a cheap made-for-TV,” observes an opportunistic commentator during the horror sequel Influencers. At that point, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose bizarre tale he once said he trusted. But his assessment of the events on screen isn't inaccurate. On its face, a pair of films on demand chronicling a young 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 network-approved weekly TV movie. The wild thing regarding Influencers remains how much better it proves to be than plenty of its competition, irrespective of screen size. It’s the kind of suspense film capable of giving other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the First Film and Establishing the Scene

The 2022 film Influencer follows the enigmatic CW (Cassandra Naud) while she quietly chooses traveling alone social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The film leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of mystery, when returning filmmaker the director picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate their one-year anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) draws CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that a person should try leaving a phone-addicted influencer somewhere without any devices and see if they can survive. Is this an origin-story prequel? Did CW become extremist by seeing the preferential treatment given to a single fame-seeker?

Evolving Viewpoints and Global Pursuits

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those introductory moments' place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, now exonerated for committing CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion over her recounting of what happened, which includes the murder of her boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), living in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform involves masculine-focused livestreams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW's interest.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, a role that appears particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s focus leans heavily into CW — the first film seemed more balanced between the two women — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and a seemingly limitless travel fund to pursue or evade one another. Of course, maybe the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, a skill which CW mirrors through her more blatant scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious about finding stunning locations to visit, although they were likely less nefarious about it. The vast majority of the movie seems to be shot on location, giving it an authentic gravity that lingers even when numerous sequences involve a handful of actors of people staring at computer or phone screens.

It follows the same logic which allowed the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent for decades: Indeed, big action and special effects can show off large spending, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts to viewers also seems deeply filmic. This is especially fitting for a story so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating jealousy-worthy digital content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these luxurious, far-flung locations to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge upon the online stars' self-centered phoniness — nonetheless devotes much time under the light of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a rant targeting the vacuousness of online fame. Though it can be satisfying to watch CW manipulate various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to hope she evades capture, the filmmaker is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. Here, Harder seems to trust that just observing Jacob at work will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his hypocrisy, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it may occasionally seem as if he’s nodding at elements of contemporary digital culture without deeply exploring them further. This is particularly evident regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, a fascinating turn which misses the psychological edge it deserves. The pluralized title for the film might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. However, initially, it’s more like a sleek Hitchcock thriller than an wild-eyed, technology-obsessed Brian De Palma thriller. Influencers’ heavy use of real-world locations may also be what prevents it from seeming like utter horror. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, for now.