A couple years ago I really liked this horror-thriller I saw on Shudder called INFLUENCER. Yes, I agree with you that movies, and especially horror, are a little too fascinated with social media influencers right now, but I swear this is a good one. Madison (Emily Tennant, SNIPER: ASSASSIN’S END) makes a very good living traveling to exotic places and posting about her adventurous lifestyle, but we see that at least at this time it’s kind of a front. She’s actually depressed and mostly staying alone at a resort in Bangkok, sad that her boyfriend didn’t come.

Then she meets CW, played by Cassandra Naud (IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE), an American expat who has lived there for a while and shows her a good time. Unfortunately for Madison, fortunately for cinema, CW turns out to be a psycho with a resentment toward influencers and the computer skills to really do a number on their lives. I like that the influencer is somehow sympathetic but the villain is still fun. It’s kind of a modern take on ‘90s thrillers like SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, BASIC INSTINCT and THE NET, but also kind of a noir because it mostly follows CW as she gets deeper and deeper into her lies and tries to navigate a smooth exit.

Now writer/director Kurtis David Harder and both stars have returned with a direct sequel called INFLUENCERS. This is not something I ever expected, partly because I didn’t know it was a popular enough movie for a sequel, and partly because it ended with (spoiler) Madison surviving her exile on an uninhabited island and turning the tables on CW. This one cleverly starts with CW not only off the island, but having started a new, happy life in southern France with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar, SURVIVE), a talented photographer. She has lots of friends around town, and Diane’s parents love her. We should know better than to trust her, but I like the possibility that she really intends to leave the stalking behind and be normal. And maybe there was an alternate path where that could’ve worked out longer, if not forever. But she has a run-in with a really obnoxious influencer, so she goes PSYCHO II.

See, CW plans a trip to the countryside for her and Diane’s anniversary, but the hotel bumps them out of the suite they reserved to give it to online hotshot Charlotte (Georgina Campbell, BARBARIAN), who then has the audacity to complain that “the room is not what they sold me on, it’s so small” in front of CW at the pool. Worse, Diane likes Charlotte, and accepts invitations to hang out with her, taking over their romantic weekend. Taken out of context you would swear CW was the innocent hero who has to save her girlfriend from a dangerous stalker.

One way that it’s a fun sequel is that it knows CW is a villain we can’t help but have some affection for, begins the movie from her point-of-view, and gives her a victim who deserves… well, some sort of pushback. So it seems like we’re having fun and then all the sudden jesus christ, CW, what have you done? Even still there’s that trick of the procedural, that we can’t help but get kind of invested in what she’s doing when it spends enough time following her processes. For example there’s a scene where she sees an apparent tourist taking selfies and follows her around. Unless I’m misunderstanding, she’s casing new potential targets. While she has a girlfriend! No matter how many lines she crosses, when things are going wrong and she looks scared of being caught, I feel pangs of sympathy for her. I can’t help it!

Only after shit has gotten out of control does the movie shift perspectives by reuniting us with Madison, who now looks more normal and has abandoned the internet in part because of constant harassment from people who don’t believe her story. She was cleared of wrongdoing for the deaths in part 1 but CW was obviously never found and people think Madison made her up (as we learn somewhat awkwardly when she’s ambushed on a podcast).

When Madison reads news stories about the death of an influencer she figures CW is be behind it and goes to France to look for her. Like if she faces her she can get her life back. You know I really didn’t think about it until now but in that sense it is a little bit like ALIENS to INFLUENCER’s ALIEN. She doesn’t have a team, though. It’s just her using her knowledge of world travel and social media to track this person.

The trail leads to Bali, where CW starts over yet again after Diane found her passports. Pulling a THE STEPFATHER. She and Madison both run into another set of influencers (oh shit, that’s why it’s plural!) centered around Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell, HOLD THE DARK, BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE), a manosphere bro whose friends imply that his sexist asshole persona isn’t true to himself, and he does have the capability of acting more normal and nice offline, but he also shows some of those attitudes for real. I got the feeling he was sort of radicalizing himself by getting too into character. His girlfriend Ariana (Veronica Long, CHRISTMAS ON CHERRY LANE) is a conservative influencer/grifter who helps manage his image. These characters seem more like pointed satire than anything in the first movie, but once again I was surprised that the movie managed to humanize them a little. Madison used to promote some bullshit but she seems like such a peach compared to all these other jerks.

I had forgotten that the first movie has some pretty fanciful stuff in it, like CW being able to use voice changers and deep fakes to take over dead people’s accounts and keep posting for them. This one takes it a little further with her having her computer speak to her as an A.I. version of her murdered girlfriend. It’s far-fetched but creepy. I like that CW goes from being kind of sympathetic to completely unhinged, and we have to think yeah, I already knew that about her, I shouldn’t have let my guard down.

To me the sequel is occasionally clunkier than the first one, with some tonal shits that felt a little off for me. SPOILER. I can’t get too mad because I like that Harder felt it was important to have a big, messy, mansion-wrecking fight between Madison and CW, but as soon as it starts the whole thing feels less serious, it’s too obvious that the actors are delighted to be doing this. At its worst, though, INFLUENCERS is having fun being pulpy and trashy, and I respect that. I like that they leave it mysterious how exactly CW got out of the pickle she was in at the end of part 1, and even more than that I like that they didn’t seem concerned about having an ending for this that would be easy to follow up on. If anything they paint themselves even more into a corner. It’s an odd, boldly inconclusive ending (VERY ENDING SPOILER) with CW realizing she’s been livestreamed committing murder and beginning a mad hatchet rampage as the credits roll. (Nice touch that some of the live commenters call it “fake and gay,” but I feel like the gig has to be up, right?)

I’m not an influencer but if I count as a tastemaker I recommend having a taste of INFLUENCER and INFLUENCERS.