The Horror Follow-Up <em>Influencers</em> Could Give Competing Streaming Suspense Films Serious FOMO

“Everything about this reeks of a bad TV movie,” remarks an opportunistic podcaster midway through the chilling follow-up Influencers. In the moment, he’s being dismissive in a calculated way of a guest whose outlandish story he previously said he trusted. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. Superficially, a pair of streaming movies about a woman who insinuates herself into the lives of social media stars and then murders them seems like the 21st-century equivalent of a lurid but network-approved weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect regarding Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of its competition, irrespective of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Revisiting the Original and Establishing the Scene

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she methodically selects traveling alone social media targets, entices them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by seizing 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 against her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director resumes with CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. On a journey to celebrate their first anniversary, UK-based influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW’s eye and anger.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer somewhere with no technology to see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The narrative viewpoint changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. The story revisits Madison, who has been cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, but still faces suspicion regarding her version of the events, including the killing of Madison’s boyfriend. We also follow Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali attempting to juice his career as part of a conservative-influencer duo with Ariana (Veronica Long), although his preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally attract CW’s attention.

Naud remains immensely captivating in her role, which seems particularly tailor-made to her strengths. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus tips heavily toward CW — the original seemed more balanced between her and Madison — it still works as a tale of rival amateur detectives, with both women both use fabricated profiles, social media surveillance, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Online personalities possess a knack for getting to explore luxurious locales at little cost, an ability that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The filmmakers behind Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating beautiful places to film, though they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. Most of the film appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that remains even when many scenes 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 consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can display a big budget, but simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous surface-level allure and try-hard grind involved in producing envy-inducing 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 contemporary villas; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off as much aerial pool video. The characters must believably inhabit these luxurious, remote places to emphasize the uncomfortable paradox 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 screens.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the emptiness of the influencer industry. Though it can be satisfying to see CW exploit different internet celebrities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of alignment allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is somewhat sympathetic to the key influencer figures. Previously, he tapped into the loneliness Madison felt during ostensibly envy-worthy vacations. In this film, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob in action will reveal that he’s peddling false masculinity to other doofuses; he resists caricaturing the character. He even grants Jacob a degree of respect by showing his true devotion to his girlfriend; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a collaborator in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach means it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits of modern online life without deeply exploring them. This is especially true regarding how he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it deserves. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale escalation, and the film ultimately delivers exactly that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a polished Alfred Hitchcock movie than an frenzied, technology-obsessed De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ extensive use of actual places might also be what prevents it from coming across like utter horror. Our society may be overrun with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself is still here, for now.