Influencer hit Shudder in 2023 after an acclaimed festival run, and its sequel arrives on the horror streamer this week. Influencers follows the continuing crimes of CW—the monstrous master of social media played by Cassandra Naud—and while it isn’t an origin story, it expands her damage path in fascinating and revealing ways. It’s also just as twisty and thrilling as Influencer, with enough gore to nudge CW into slasher-villain territory.
Take note: you do need to watch Influencer to get the full benefit of Influencers, but it’s 90 minutes very well spent. The sequel runs slightly longer, a necessary enhancement thanks to Influencers’ more sprawling setting and timeline. Like the first film, Influencers waits until nearly 30 minutes in before unfurling its opening credits, giving you a chunk of CW-spawned destruction to sit with while you wonder how in the hell she’s going to top what you just saw.
In fact, Influencers gives you two jaw-dropping chunks to ponder right off the bat. The first scene shows a woman having a panic attack as her cell phone dings message after message, then grabbing a knife and slashing her own throat. As she bleeds out, the phone rings, and it’s “Catherine Weaver” calling. Interesting. Then we cut to France, where we find CW, now going by Catherine… happy, smiling, and in a committed relationship with the lovely Diane (Lisa Delamar).
Kurtis David Harder—director of both Influencer movies and the solo writer of Influencers after co-writing the first with Tesh Guttikonda—knows how much this shocks us. Last time we saw CW, she was stranded on that island in Thailand, wryly grinning as Madison (Emily Tennant), whose against-the-odds survival ended CW’s streak of abandoning victims there to die, stole her boat and sped away in Influencer’s final moments. How are we now finding her living in soft-focus romantic bliss, half of a couple preparing to celebrate their first anniversary?
Influencer fans know that ripping the rug out from under the audience is Harder’s specialty—especially with such a diabolical lead character leading the charge—so it’s not a spoiler to say CW’s circumstances soon change; though her affection for Diane seems sincere, it’s not enough to keep those sinister impulses from rising up and taking over.
It’s also not a spoiler to say that new characters are soon drawn into CW’s treacherous orbit, and they’re her favorite types of victims: social-media creators too busy taking selfies, curating lives that appear perfect, and increasing their follower counts to realize they’ve left themselves open to manipulation and worse by a genuine psychopath. That’s what happened to Madison in the first film; this time around, the unlucky include a condescending Brit played by Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell as well as a “manosphere” livestreamer played by Jonathan Whitesell, along with his bestie Cameron (Letterkenny’s Dylan Playfair) and girlfriend Ariana (Veronica Long).
Are these people so irredeemably awful that they deserve what happens to them? Influencers nudges you to ponder that while also making you feel continuously challenged by who you’re supposed to sympathize with.
As others have observed, CW is a sort of Tom Ripley figure, and Influencers confidently operates as a riff on Patricia Highsmith’s stories about him. Then there’s the added enhancement of CW being a tech whiz. She can hack into any phone or computer almost instantly, and she can also deep-fake a fully credible rendering of a human being—going far beyond the first film’s Instagram trickery here. As part of that, she herself is a digital ghost; we don’t know if “Catherine” or even “CW” is her real name, and she keeps a stash of passports that allow her to switch identities as quickly as she can steal a new one.
Just about the only thing that ever compromises the chameleonic CW is the one thing that makes her truly memorable: the large birthmark on her cheek. Naud was already a savvy casting choice given her charisma and acting talents, but this aspect of her appearance brings even more intrigue to CW. Does she hate social media stars because she rejects their insistence on physical perfection? As in the first film, it’s never discussed outright, and we rarely see CW trying to conceal her most distinguishing feature. But even more than it was in Influencer, the birthmark is what makes her stand out. It’s the one identifier everyone remembers about her—the one thing that prevents her from being a true ghost.
While CW’s motive remains murky in Influencers, it’s crystal clear why Madison is also a part of the sequel. She has some major unfinished business. She may have fought her way out of the first film, but her life was ripped apart in the aftermath. She was cleared of murdering the people CW killed in Influencer, but suspicion clings to her—in part because CW’s manipulation of her social media accounts was so skillfully incriminating, but also because her story sounds so unbelievable she’s become a pariah, targeted by true crime obsessives and outright stalkers.
So, yes, Influencers is also a revenge tale—at her wit’s end, Madison picks up CW’s trail simply by googling “dead influencer” and connecting the dots. It adds even more juicy drama to a film that also, not accidentally, takes place exclusively in gorgeous locations lensed to make them look even more like temptingly postcard-perfect vacation spots… where evil lurks just out of frame, waiting for you to let your guard down so it can wriggle its way into your life.
Influencers streams on Shudder starting December 12; Influencer is already available there if you need to catch up.
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