Influencers review: a horror-thriller designed to give other movies FOMO

The new Shudder movie goes on location, proving how much of a difference real settings can make

“The whole thing reeks like a bad made-for-TV movie,” an opportunistic podcaster says halfway through the horror sequel Influencers. In the moment, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest whose outlandish story he previously claimed he believed. But his description of what’s happening in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, a pair of streaming movies about a young woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them feels like the 21st-century equivalent of a tawdry yet network-approved Movie of the Week. The wild thing about Influencers is how much better it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of screen size. It’s the kind of thriller that should give other movies a bad case of FOMO.

2022’s Influencer follows the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling influencer targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those deaths (at least temporarily) by taking control of their socials. The movie leaves off (spoiler ahead) with CW stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Thailand, after her latest target, Madison (Emily Tennant), turns the tables on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers some early ambiguity, as returning writer-director Kurtis David Harder picks up with CW happily living with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s one-year anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell from Barbarian) catches CW’s eye and ire. CW remarks to Diane that someone should try stranding a phone-addicted influencer somewhere without any devices and see whether they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the preferential treatment afforded a single clout-chaser?

The story’s perspective shifts several more times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, who has been cleared of committing CW’s crimes, but still faces suspicion over her recounting of the events, including the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows 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 preferred medium is bro-heavy streams, rather than the Instagram photos that normally capture CW’s attention.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in her role, which seems especially tailor-made to her strengths. (She also designed CW's eye-catching outfits.) While the sequel’s screentime balance tips heavily toward CW — the original felt more equally divided between her and Madison — it still works as a story of dueling amateur detectives, as Madison and CW both use fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to pursue and/or escape each other. Then again, maybe the unlimited budget isn’t necessary. Influencers have a knack for getting to explore posh places without paying much, a skill that CW echoes with her more overt scamming.

The filmmakers behind Influencers seem similarly ingenious about finding beautiful places to visit, though they were presumably less nefarious about it. At a Q&A following a screening at the Brooklyn Horror Festival in October, Harder mentioned shooting with a minimal crew, in part because it enabled the production to pack up and actually go to Paris and Bali. The vast majority of the movie appears to be shot on location, giving it a real-world weight that lingers even when many scenes consist of a relatively small cast of characters staring at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the James Bond movies look so consistently opulent over the years: Yes, explosive action and special effects can show off a big budget, but just providing a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. It’s also particularly appropriate for a story so dependent on the simultaneous superficial glamour and try-hard grind of creating jealousy-worthy online content.

All of the characters visiting Bali, like those staying in Thailand in the original, seem to have access to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies about lifeguards that don’t show off this much overhead swimming-pool footage. The characters have to convincingly inhabit these lush, far-flung locations to emphasize the uneasy irony of how often everyone — even the woman wreaking vengeance on the influencers’ self-centered phoniness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their screens.

At the same time, Harder hasn’t authored a screed against the vacuousness of the influencer industry. Though it can be satisfying to see CW manipulate various online personalities, and a Hitchcockian sense of identification allows us to hope she doesn’t get caught, the filmmaker is relatively sympathetic to the major influencer characters. In the first movie, he keyed into the loneliness Madison experienced while on supposedly 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 resists caricaturing the character further. He even gives Jacob a measure of dignity by showing his genuine loyalty to his girlfriend; he’s a hypocrite, but Ariana is a partner in his hypocrisy, not a victim of it.

The other side of Harder’s even-keeled presentation is that it can sometimes appear as if he’s nodding at bits 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 psychosexual kick it should have. The pluralized title of Influencers might give fans of the first movie hope for an Aliens-style ante-upping, and the movie does eventually provide that, with a suitably wild final act. But before that, it’s more like a sleek 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 coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world may be overrun with content-churning influencers, digital deception, and self-serving tourism, but the world itself is still here, for now.

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Influencers is now streaming on Shudder.