CW is back, in this glossy, bloody, enjoyably silly sequel that lets her carve her way through the worst people on the internet – one smug travel influencer at a time.
★★★½
Famously, James Cameron was in a pitch meeting with a studio head and executive producers when he turned his script over and, on the blank side of the last page, wrote ALIEN. Then he drew an S on the end, then two vertical lines through the S and held it up to show them. ALIEN$. They said yes. Perhaps Kurtis David Harder has been taking notes, because he’s gone all-out with Influencers, a gleefully ludicrous sequel to 2022’s breakout streaming hit Influencer.
Yes, the bitch with the backpack is back, and she’s still got a knack for slaughter. Influencers picks up with Cassandra Naud’s killer sociopath CW in a sun-drenched new location – this time in the south of France, shacked up with a girlfriend and playing domestic. When a British travel influencer (Georgina Campbell) interrupts their anniversary, CW decides it’s time to put her in her place – from a great height.
Meanwhile, the first film’s heroine, Madison (Emily Tennant) still sits under a cloud of public suspicion that she may have been that movie’s killer. A podcast ambush by a couple of true crime bros is enough to make her pledge to track down CW and find justice – or wreck revenge.
Harder keeps the surface glossy, with pastel villas, cliffside sun-traps, and influencer-ready vistas masking a story that leans more into tongue-in-cheek satire than the original’s survival horror. CW kills as much out of indignation and survival as for any personal gain; the excellent Naud continues to carry the role with quiet confidence, her face a study in Tom Ripley-esque calculation and false bonhomie. Campbell adds spark as the smug new arrival who irritates a semi-retired CW back into her old ways, and Jonathan Whitesell and Veronica Long sink their teeth into their roles as Jacob and Ariana, an online conservative power-couple who cultivate a Tate-style manosphere audience.
Unfortunately, the film trips over its own structure: flashbacks and flashforwards muddy the momentum, and one or two fudged reveals don’t hit as hard as they’re clearly meant to. You’ll also need to have the first movie fresh in your mind – this is very much a direct continuation, and not a great jumping on point.
But when it’s running at full steam, Influencers is a sharp, vicious ride with wild flourishes that echo the better kind of ‘90s trash thrillers. It combines a happily dumb plot with knowing insights into the ways dehumanising social media and online grifter culture bring out the sociopath in everyone, to create a world of masks and duplicity. Without spoilers, Harder also pushes forward on the first film’s sinister use of bleeding edge technology, to give a fascinatingly sun-drenched gothic spin on our emerging uses of artificial intelligence.
So yes, Influencers has a lot going on, and it’s certainly not all effectively marshalled. But Naud is a triumph, endlessly watchable as the aspirational lifestyle psycho, and the sight of her hacking her way through a parade of insufferable Insta-couple influencers is a total joy. Influencers’ storytelling may be muddied, but the final catharsis is crystal clear.
Influencers played the Fantasia International Film Festival
Whitlock&Pope 