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Chicago – One of the sauciest new jobs that has arisen from the digital era is that of “Influencer.” Gathering followers, showing off new products and using your personality is the job description in this age of clicks. Writer/director Alex Haughey explores this phenomenon in his new film “Under the Influencer,” which is currently available for download and streaming.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Tori (Taylor Scorse) has been an influencer since shyly going online at age 15 to teach an eyeliner technique. Eventually her personality reaches a large audience, and she officially makes a living as an influencer. Ten years later, she’s still at it, but losing touch with the target audience. Her team gets more desperate, and her personal life starts to infiltrate the online persona, blurring lines in her life. What happens when someone is 25 years old and knows nothing about who she is?

The film is brilliantly balanced between the...

For a year in the the 2010s, filmmaker Alex Haughey worked for a social media influencer — a job he quickly tried to put behind him.

“It was not a good job, but it was an interesting character study of this life outside of reality,” says Haughey, who went on to direct the low-budget supernatural thriller Prodigy, which was released in 2018 and eventually made a bit of a splash when it later streamed on Netflix.

Haughey was looking for his next project after Prodigy, and found it with Under the Influencer. “If you saw Prodigy, you wouldn’t pick this out as my next project,” he notes with a laugh.

Inspiration struck when Haughey happened to watch the 1962 French feature Cleo from 5 to 7, which centers on a singer who, while she lived decades before social media, still reminded him of the influencer he once worked for.

“Everyone handles her and pampers her.