Influencers (2025)
Directed & Written by Kurtis David Harder
Starring Cassandra Naud, Emily Tennant, Georgina Campbell, Lisa Delamar, Jonathan Whitesell, Veronica Long, & Dylan Playfair.

Horror / Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SLIGHT SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

Kurtis David Harder’s Influencers picks up a little while after the events of Influencer, as CW (Cassandra Naud) continues globetrotting and getting up to her old nasty tricks. This time, CW has a significant other in her life, Diane (Lisa Delamar), and they’re living somewhere in South France. It doesn’t take too long before things sour. While CW thinks she can just continue to leave carnage and bodies in her wake, she underestimates the determination of her previous would-be victim, Madison (Emily Tennant), whose life was turned upside down after being left for dead and nearly having all the violence CW caused pinned on her. Madison refuses to let CW get away with it all, even if it means a lot more travelling and a whole lot more blood.

Influencers is even more dark fun than Influencer, particularly because of how it portrays identity in an increasingly volatile and devious digital world. Harder’s film questions just how far people can make it on a fake digital existence, as CW’s past rapidly catches up with her, and it likewise looks hard at how much real-life damage can be done by someone when they hide behind a fabricated identity online.
A lovely little touch Harder included in the first Influencer was CW reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and it even tied into the film’s themes, so it’s exciting to see this trend continue in the sequel when we glimpse CW reading David Dodge’s To Catch a Thief. First of all, the film is set in South France, and Dodge’s book is set in the French Riviera during the early 1950s. While Twain’s inclusion in the first film was a reflection of CW almost being a balancing, vengeful force against vapid influencer culture, Dodge’s inclusion in the sequel is a reflection of CW as someone whose past haunts them and hunts them down. Whereas the protagonist of Dodge’s novel, John Robie, is a kind of antihero, CW is merely a villain who’s convinced herself she’s a good person deserving of a peaceful, lovely life. CW’s past comes calling and, rather than help vindicate her like Robie, it ultimately, via Madison, traps her within the fabricated, violent identity she’s conjured up over the years, leaving her no escape.

Just like Influencer took digs at influencers and influencer culture, Influencers touches on things like kink shaming’s potentially horrific consequences in a post-privacy digital landscape, as well as the hilarious contradictions of terminally online, misogynistic, homophobic men. CW and Madison both meet Jacob (Jon Whitesell), a creepy streamer who’s a hybrid of Andrew Tate and others of his ilk, and he’s in a relationship with Ariana (Veronica Long), another terminally online weirdo. We hear Ariana at one point lamenting that the “gender ideology cult is coming for your children.” Later, her privacy is violated terribly when CW uploads a sex tape she finds amongst Jacob’s files, and it leads to something even more grisly. The real irony is the revelation that Jacob, a man who calls other men “faggots” and warns them not to become a “wage cuck,” is a literal cuckold who enjoys watching Ariana be fucked by another man. While Influencers is largely focused on CW’s perilous journey through identity, the film does a great job of satirising the digital patriarchal space and confronting how little privacy is left in a digital world held together by a few bad passwords and flimsy multi-factor authentication.

Influencers turns the dial up a few notches from the original, as it takes on various problems we face today online, from identity theft to invasions of privacy and more. After Madison rears her head again, we see her deal with the fallout of the first film’s aftermath when she goes on a podcast with two dude-bros who are only interested in how tragedy equals views/listeners and selling ad space built on death and trauma. In a darkly hilarious scene, the men quickly shift from grilling Madison about the charges against her to delivering a branded ad for, of all things, a VPN service (“Ooh, ooh, ahh, ahh, protect your IP address for only $9.99 a month“). Influencers is a dark, hilarious, and violent satire of where we’ve ended up as a global society due to the tentacle-like reach of the internet and all its ghastly possibilities. The scariest part? There are many CWs out there who we don’t know about and probably never ever will.