A Sequel I Had Apparently Prepared for by Forgetting the First Film
A few minutes into Influencers, I had the mildly embarrassing feeling that the film knew more about my viewing history than I did. The beaches, the carefully manufactured smiles, Cassandra Naud’s CW and that unmistakable birthmark all felt familiar, but not familiar enough. Then the obvious finally arrived: this was not simply another social-media thriller with an annoyingly similar title. It was the sequel to Influencer, a film I had already watched and managed to file somewhere in the increasingly unreliable archive of my brain.
So I stopped. Rather than spend the next two hours vaguely remembering plot points several seconds after the film expected me to know them, I went back and watched Influencer again from the beginning. What I meant as a refresher turned into a double feature, and the two films work unusually well that way. The extra letter in the sequel’s title is almost a joke — Influencer becomes Influencers — but it also describes what Kurtis David Harder has done with the story. The first film is tight and predatory, centred on one carefully selected victim. The second widens the frame, multiplies the targets and asks what happens when the same pathology moves through a much noisier digital world.
Influencer: Paradise, Carefully Cropped
Influencer premiered at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in October 2022 and reached Shudder in May 2023. Harder co-wrote it with Tesh Guttikonda, David Schuurman shot it, and the finished film runs a lean 92 minutes. It looks considerably larger than the production behind it. Harder has said that the travelling unit moved around Thailand with only 11 people including cast, and that smallness is part of the film’s texture: the camera can drift through real streets, bars, boats and beaches without making every location feel sealed off for a production.
At first the film seems to be setting up an easy target. Madison, played by Emily Tennant, is a travel influencer stranded in Thailand after her boyfriend Ryan decides not to join her. Her feed says paradise. Her actual holiday is mostly hotel rooms, room-service food, scrolling and the low-grade misery of having to produce evidence that you are having a better time than you really are. That contradiction could have supported ninety minutes of smug jokes about influencers, but the film is smarter than that. Madison is not presented as a monster because she knows how to frame a photograph. She is lonely, professionally boxed in and not nearly as confident as the person on her screen.
Then CW enters, and the film quietly changes ownership. Cassandra Naud plays her with the sort of relaxed confidence that immediately makes Madison look even more stranded. CW knows where to eat, where to drink and where to go once you leave the resort version of Thailand behind. She has no visible interest in followers and initially seems to offer Madison precisely what the online version of the trip has been missing: an actual experience with another person.
The trick is that CW is also performing. She is simply much better at it. Once Madison’s passport disappears and CW proposes an excursion to an isolated island, the film stops pretending this is a mismatched-travellers story. Madison is abandoned there while CW begins taking over the life she has been studying. The theft is not merely financial or digital. CW uses the account, the accommodation, the relationships and the assumptions people have already made about Madison. The internet has done half the impersonation work for her.
CW Is More Interesting Than the Film’s Easy Villain Could Have Been
The rewatch reminded me how much of Influencer depends on Naud refusing to play CW as a conventional psycho waiting for permission to become scary. She can be funny, observant and oddly companionable. The menace comes from how easily those qualities sit beside calculation. Her facial birthmark is not treated as a secret explanation or a cheap visual shorthand for damage; it is simply part of the face she carries through each new identity, which makes the character more memorable rather than less.
There is a Patricia Highsmith flavour to the whole thing — less because CW resembles Tom Ripley in any literal sense than because she understands that identity is partly an administrative problem. Clothes, passwords, rooms, photographs, other people’s expectations: assemble enough of them and the world tends to cooperate. Harder has cited Hitchcock and Highsmith among his influences, and the film is at its best when murder feels almost secondary to the pleasure CW takes in manipulating the shape of a life.
The supporting characters complicate the joke as well. Ryan initially looks like the boyfriend the film has already decided we should dislike, but his arrival forces CW to improvise because he actually cares where Madison is. Jessica, another traveller and influencer, is not simply fed into the plot as a disposable stereotype either. The more people CW encounters, the more the film makes the point that a curated persona can be irritating without making the person behind it unreal.
The ending is what matters most once the sequel exists. Madison survives, takes the boat and leaves CW behind. CW watches her escape with a smile that does not quite read as defeat. On first viewing it is an enjoyably strange final note. On a rewatch, knowing another film is waiting, it feels less like a cliffhanger than a statement of character. CW is not particularly interested in the moral accounting the audience expects. Surviving the game, winning the game and enjoying the game are three different things to her.
That is also why the first film’s visual polish does not feel accidental. Thailand is shot beautifully because beauty is part of the trap. The film understands the difference between mocking an Instagram photograph and understanding why somebody would want to make one. Schuurman’s images often look exactly like the sort of thing Madison would post, and then Harder lets the same landscape become empty, exposed or threatening.
Add One Letter: Influencers
Then there is that extra s. Influencers had its world premiere at Fantasia on 26 July 2025 and arrived on Shudder on 12 December. Harder returned as writer-director, with Schuurman again behind the camera and Avery Kentis returning for the score. The sequel runs 110 minutes, and the larger scale is immediately obvious, although the production method remained unusually small. Harder has said the crew was generally under 15 people and that he spent almost five months on the road, travelling through France and Bali; reporting around the release also places parts of the production in North America.
CW is now living as Catherine with Diane, played by Lisa Delamar, and this is the first important change. The first film gives CW appetites and methods; the second gives her something that looks alarmingly like a life. Their relationship in France is not presented as another simple con. There are stretches where CW appears genuinely happy, which makes the inevitable return of her compulsions more interesting than a reset would have been. For once, she has something she could simply choose to keep.
The problem arrives in the form of Charlotte, a British travel influencer played by Georgina Campbell. She intrudes on an anniversary holiday with the sort of relentless friendliness that would be merely exhausting in another film. Here, every minor irritation lands beside our knowledge of what CW does when she feels entitled to remove a problem. The suspense is no longer about discovering whether CW is dangerous. We already know that. It is about watching somebody who has built a workable life decide whether she can resist being herself.
Madison Comes Back With the Patience Burned Out of Her
The better surprise is Madison. The sequel does not pretend surviving CW restored her life. She was legally cleared, but online conspiracy theories continued to attach her to what happened, and she has stepped away from the influencer life entirely. Emily Tennant plays her with the brittle focus of somebody who is tired of telling the truth to people who find the lie more entertaining. In the first film she is selected, isolated and acted upon. In the sequel she starts hunting.
That reversal gives Influencers a structure the first film could not have had. CW is building and destroying identities while Madison is trying to reconstruct a factual record of what happened. They are both investigators in their own crooked way. CW studies people so she can become useful to them; Madison studies traces because she needs somebody, eventually everybody, to see the same pattern she sees.
The technology has changed around them too. The first film was conceived before generative AI became part of ordinary conversation. By the sequel, synthetic voices and manufactured digital presence no longer feel like speculative-thriller machinery; they are simply tools a person like CW would plausibly use. The film does not stop to give a lecture about AI. It folds the technology into the same problem it has been interested in from the beginning: if enough pieces of a person can be reproduced convincingly, how much of that person do other people actually need?
France, Bali and the People Who Turn Themselves Into Products
The film eventually widens again in Bali, where Jacob and Ariana bring a different corner of online performance into the story. Jonathan Whitesell’s Jacob operates in the manosphere, selling a swaggering version of masculinity that may be partly performance but still has consequences. Veronica Long’s Ariana helps maintain the machine around him. The distinction between “I really believe this” and “this is what performs well” starts to become meaningless once the character is profitable enough.
This is where the plural in the title really earns itself. The sequel is not simply “CW does the same thing to another influencer”. It is interested in a small ecosystem of people who monetise versions of themselves: travel, lifestyle, relationships, masculinity, ideology. They are different products built on the same platform logic. The nastiest joke is that CW belongs in that ecosystem too. She may despise people who package themselves for an audience, but she has spent two films packaging herself for whoever happens to be useful.
Harder’s small-crew method is especially useful here. France and Bali do not feel like generic “international” backdrops assembled from second-unit footage. The streets, pools, villas and ruined spaces have enough texture to make the film resemble a very expensive travel diary with a sociopath wandering through it. That was already the visual joke of Influencer; the sequel simply gives it more stamps in the passport.
The Difference Between Being Seen and Being Known
What I like most about these films is that they never reduce their argument to “social media is fake”. That observation was tired before the first film was even written. Harder is interested in something stranger: the way performance can become a working identity. Madison’s cheerful travel feed, Jacob’s masculine brand, Charlotte’s friendliness and CW’s succession of selves all begin as things performed for other people. Repeat the performance long enough and the boundary between strategy and personality becomes very hard to locate.
CW understands this better than anyone. She does not need to become another person completely; she needs to control the handful of signals by which other people recognise them. A photograph appears. A message arrives. A voice sounds right. A passport matches. The account remains active. Most of us are not conducting forensic investigations into the people we know every day. We accept the signals because ordinary life would be impossible otherwise. CW’s talent is recognising how much trust is built into that laziness.
The sequel eventually pushes that idea into public spectacle. Livestreaming turns private violence into something witnessed in real time, and the old assumption that visibility automatically produces truth starts to collapse. Thousands of people can be watching the same event and still encounter it first as content. Evidence competes with entertainment. Exposure is not the same thing as accountability, particularly when the person being exposed has stopped caring about appearing normal.
A Franchise Built Backwards From Character
There is something pleasingly unfashionable about how these films have grown. Influencer does not spend its running time planting franchise mythology, explaining childhood trauma or withholding an origin story for episode three. It works as a self-contained thriller. The sequel exists because CW turned out to be a character worth following, and instead of answering every lingering question — including the deliberately annoying matter of exactly how she got off that island — it uses the extra space to see what happens when she has more to lose.
That is also why I do not particularly need a neat explanation for why CW became CW. A prequel could be interesting, but one of the pleasures of Naud’s performance is that the character is legible without being solved. She likes control, she enjoys the hunt, she resents certain kinds of entitlement, and she is perfectly capable of loving somebody while remaining catastrophically dangerous. That contradiction is more useful than a single childhood incident with a red circle drawn around it.
Why Watching Them Back-to-Back Worked
Going back to the first film before finishing the second turned out to be the right kind of inconvenience. Details I would otherwise have half-remembered were still fresh: Madison’s loneliness before CW ever enters the story, the way Ryan complicates CW’s tidy plan simply by showing up, the boat, the island, the smile at the end. Influencers is much richer when Madison’s earlier passivity is sitting right beside the harder, more obsessive person she has become.
It also makes Harder’s progression easier to see. The first film uses isolation: one tourist, one stranger, one island, one stolen life. The second uses accumulation. More countries, more identities, more forms of influence, more people trying to turn themselves into something an audience can consume. It is bigger without becoming anonymous, largely because Naud and Tennant give the series a human line running through all that glossy scenery.
The title finally feels less like sequel punctuation and more like a thesis. One influencer can be studied, copied and replaced. A world of influencers is a system, and CW is both its predator and one of its most committed practitioners. She hates the performance while being astonishingly good at it.
I began the double feature because I had forgotten too much of the first film. I finished it thinking that forgetting was oddly appropriate. These are movies about how unreliable identity becomes once we outsource pieces of it to photographs, accounts, messages and whatever version of ourselves other people happen to remember. CW would probably approve. She has been exploiting that weakness from the beginning, and after two films I am fairly certain I would still make the basic horror-movie mistake of accepting her offer to show me the good local places.
Viewing note: Influencer (2022) runs 92 minutes. Influencers (2025) runs 110 minutes. The sequel premiered at Fantasia on 26 July 2025 and was released on Shudder on 12 December 2025. For this particular series, watching them in order — preferably close together — makes a substantial difference.
Leave a Reply