Influencers

Cassandra Naud still rules the screen as a femme fatale, and the fact that Shudder is attempting to turn this into a franchise is laudable. The first act is just like part one, with CW (Naud) going about her usual ways of killing online influencers and stealing their identities. There's a romantic angle at play too, with the locations moving between Southern France and Bali. A big question is how CW survived the concluding events of part one, and it's asked by multiple people in the film.

Whether that gets answered or not, we see progress in storytelling. CW's romance with a French woman is given greater depth than expected (in a film with a slasher identity), depicting that even psychopaths can have surprisingly good love episodes in life (..even if, for a little while). On the other hand, Madison (Emily Tennant, from part one realizes that CW is still murdering influencers in another part of the globe and goes after her.

The appeal of these films lies in their self-aware, satirical portrayal of influencer lifestyles. It's both funny and sad to see the lengths some folks go only to stay "relevant" on the internet. The suspension of disbelief is fairly high, considering how CW continues to do what she does in the digital era with such a recognizable face. Even if that's a story discarded by the news media, Reddit wouldn't have left her alone (lol!). Madison's an idiot for not going that anonymous route, and instead, a simple Google search query is shown to give her a lead.

Anyway, that aside, the film kept me entertained for 1h 45m. The Bali locations (Seminyak and Ubud, if I'm not wrong) are really ripe for a plot of this nature, and it's nice to see South/East Asia being tapped as a storytelling location. Let's take the next few to Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia, etc. The kills are interesting too, with Cassandra Naud and her deadpan face doing the job. The character is a lot more complex this time around, and there's an attempt to make us empathize with her, even after her sadistic actions.

I enjoyed the original from 2022, it had a simple story, shot in beautiful Thailand and wasn't trying to be something more than what it was - a silly thriller with a touch of horror. Cassandra Naud stole the show with her beauty and her captivating screen presence as CW, and at an overall 90 min running time it didn't have too many boring moments.

The Sequel however, is almost 2 hours, and tries to add a relationship angle to CW's life, which makes it a bit boring and makes her character less mysterious as she was in the first movie.

Also, Police doesn't seem to exist in the world of 'influencers', people get murdered left and right, and not one single police officer shows up.

The ending was wild but also didn't make much sense, let's see if they make a third one, if they do, i hope they will return to basics, and keep it simple with not more than 90 min running time.

No pun intended - this was the last movie of this years Frightfest (that's 2025 in case I have to change the review or redo for some ominous reason). It also is the sequel to the movie Influencer - as everyone noticed, you do not necessarily have to have seen it - but it makes sense to watch it either before or at least after you've seen this.

It will not answer the one question that is being asked the most here - which has to do with the ending of the last movie ... but maybe you can piece it together.

What you won't really be able to piece together: the "plans" of our rival characters here ... they have quite some beef with each other ... and it all culminates in one hell of a finale ... still that does not mean there is not room (or other vacation spots for that matter), that a third Influencer movie couldn't cover ... Influenc3r? I called it, in case that becomes reality!

If you don't mind mayhem, horror and blood ... well you could do worse. Some people may have clapped for some misfortunes (that's what I'll call it) of annoying characters ... which I thought was a bit over the top - but it's a movie, so hopefully it's just the party vibe and not the inner psychos letting loose ... ;) just saying.

Now, when I stumbled upon this 2025 horror movie I was about to skip on it, solely because of the movie's title. Yeah, I have zero interest and respect for the freeloader concept of 'influencers', and thus I almost passed this movie. But I opted to give it a fair chance, solely because it was a horror movie that I hadn't already seen.

Writer Kurtis David Harder, whom also directed the movie, didn't really impress me with the storyline for this movie. Sure, it was watchable, but it was by no means a particularly outstanding thriller or horror experience. In fact, I have to admit that the movie felt more like a mere background noise than it did as something commanding your undivided attention from start to end.

Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with Cassandra Naud from the 2022 movie "Influencer". The acting performances in the movie were good, no doubt about that.

It is not a movie that uses a whole lot of special effects. But then again, it is a story-driven narrative, so it didn't really need an abundance of special effects in order to deliver its narrative.

Watchable, sure, but hardly a memorable horror or thriller experience. And definitely not a movie that warrants more than a single viewing.

My rating of writer and director Kurtis David Harder's 2025 movie "Influencers" lands on a five out of ten stars.

There's something perversely tender about watching a sociopath try on normalcy like an ill-fitting costume, and for about forty minutes, Influencers understands this better than it has any right to. CW, now "Catherine," eating pastries with her oblivious girlfriend in golden Provençal light, is both unsettling and weirdly poignant. You can't tell if she's genuinely changed or if this is just her most elaborate performance yet, and that ambiguity is the film's secret weapon when it bothers to use it. Cassandra Naud plays it with this watchful stillness, like she's always calculating three moves ahead even when she's supposedly relaxed, and those early scenes have a strange, fragile intimacy that made me lean in despite knowing exactly what kind of movie this was going to become.

Then Georgina Campbell's Charlotte shows up, all performative warmth and boundary violations disguised as friendliness, and you can practically see CW's carefully constructed facade starting to crack. The film gets genuinely interesting here because it's not just about a killer relapsing. It's about someone who thought they could outrun their nature discovering that maybe domesticity isn't the opposite of violence, maybe it's just another kind of control. The way CW watches Charlotte monopolize Diane's attention, the tightness around her mouth, the forced smiles, it's the behavior of someone whose entire sense of self is being threatened, and the film briefly touches something real about how fragile reinvention actually is.

Emily Tennant's Madison, though, that's where my heart kept landing. The film hands her this gutting arc, transforming her from influencer royalty to conspiracy theory fodder, and Tennant plays it with this hollow-eyed exhaustion that feels genuinely lived in. There's a scene where she's folding towels at the mall, and someone recognizes her and starts filming, and the way her face just shuts down, like she's died a thousand small deaths already and this is just one more, it destroyed me a little. When she decides to hunt CW, it doesn't feel like revenge exactly. It feels like the last available move for someone who's already lost everything, and that desperation makes her dangerous in ways the film doesn't always know what to do with.

The cat and mouse structure works better than it should, mostly because both women are so singularly focused that their scenes together (and there aren't nearly enough of them) crackle with this tense, almost erotic energy. They're mirror images, both trying to control narratives that keep slipping away, both performing versions of themselves for audiences who may or may not be watching. When the film commits to this central dynamic, tracking them from France back to Bali, it finds a propulsive rhythm that reminded me of the nasty little pleasures in something like Ingrid Goes West, where social performance becomes indistinguishable from psychological warfare.

But then there's Jacob and his whole men's rights streaming subplot, and honestly, I'm still not sure what the film thinks it's doing there. Jonathan Whitesell is fine, I guess, playing this aggrieved Beta male type with his more dominant girlfriend, but these extended detours into his friendship drama with the himbo Cameron character feel like they wandered in from a completely different movie. Maybe it's supposed to be commentary on how internet grievance culture creates these weird alliances of convenience? Or maybe the film is trying to say something about different kinds of performance and masculine fragility? But it plays like padding, like the filmmakers didn't trust that watching two women destroy each other would be compelling enough on its own, so they hedged their bets with this ultimately toothless social satire that never really lands.

The frustrating thing is that when Influencers focuses on CW and Madison, it finds something genuinely unsettling about identity in the age of constant documentation. CW's attempt at anonymity, Madison's forced exile from the only world she knew, they're both grappling with the impossibility of truly disappearing or starting over when your image has been infinitely reproduced and weaponized. There's a moment late in the film where they finally confront each other, and for about two minutes, it's electric, both of them performing for each other and themselves and some imagined audience, and you realize the film has been building to this collision all along. Then it veers off into another Jacob scene and you want to scream.

This will hit hard for anyone who enjoyed the trashy, self-aware pleasures of the first film and wants to see what happens when its villain tries to play house. If you're drawn to stories about women locked in psychosexual combat, performing and counter-performing until neither can remember what's real anymore, there's enough here to sink your teeth into. But if you need your thrillers lean and focused, if detours into MRA streamer drama sound like nails on a chalkboard, you'll spend half the runtime wishing someone had been ruthless enough to cut thirty minutes and trust the central battle. I'm somewhere in between, grateful for what works, irritated by what doesn't, and oddly moved by the idea that even a killer might want to believe she's capable of change, even if she probably isn't.