Vague Visages’ Influencers review contains minor spoilers. Kurtis David Harder’s 2025 Shudder movie on AMC+ features Cassandra Naud, Emily Tennant and Georgina Campbell. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer (2022) is a dark and criminally underseen delight. Ruthlessly skewering the attention economy, the movie (which the filmmaker also co-wrote) demonstrates how everybody — but especially young women — leaves themselves vulnerable to being stalked, scammed and impersonated due to social media posts. Influencer ends on a relatively clean note, so a sequel wasn’t exactly inevitable. But Influencers more than justifies both returning to the story at hand and expanding upon it, widening the scope to take in, as the title suggests, several different content creators. Naturally, though, the devious villain CW still effortlessly runs rings around all of them.

Taking place a year after the events of the first movie, Influencers once again opens with a 30-minute-long prologue to set the scene before the credits drop — a cheeky move that Harder should replicate in every future film. A young woman in a chic, all-white outfit enters her opulent home and, standing next to a gleaming pool, slits her throat. You can’t beat blood spilling all over white clothing, but, in this case, the red stuff looks so wonderfully thick (it’s the perfect shade of crimson red and has a great texture to it too) that it’s impossible to look away. The neck wound itself is exemplary as well. This moment speaks to the attention to detail present elsewhere. Although Influencers is about 20 minutes longer than its predecessor, there’s no bloat whatsoever.

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More pressing than the poor woman’s suicide is the incoming call she gets while it’s happening, from one Catherine Weaver, aka CW, the diabolical female villain from the first movie. Actress Cassandra Naud, who has a producer credit this time around, made mincemeat of the role in her debut and she’s just as good, if not even better, in Influencers. She even acts in French, since the focus soon switches to catch up with CW, who is enjoying a life of domestic bliss in the south of France (somewhat shockingly) with paramour Diane (Lisa Delamar). Further demonstrating that bisexuals cannot be trusted, CW is clearly in character once again. She’s dressed very demurely, smiling a lot and even speaking in an airier, more feminine cadence. But there’s also reason to believe that the murderous schemer is actually happy with Diane. That is, until a new influencer shows up.

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Barbarian (2022) star Georgina Campbell has a ball in her few short scenes as a loudmouth Brit named Charlotte who runs afoul of CW after unintentionally swiping the special room she’d picked out for a romantic weekend with Diane in the countryside. The next time the influencer-killer appears, she is back in Asia, laying low in Bali. Influencers was shot on location once again, and it really pays off, with tons of stunning vistas to appreciate. In a time when audiences are growing increasingly used to out-of-focus, CG-addled backgrounds, which are depressingly becoming the norm, it’s heartening to watch a camera sweep around an actual locale, to give viewers the opportunity to appreciate every inch of the frame. Harder has a terrific eye, especially when shooting outside, and he sets the scene with little to no exposition necessary. Are we ever going to find out how CW got off that damn island?!

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Madison (Emily Tennant), whom CW leaves for dead at the beginning of Influencer but ultimately manages to escape, is in dire straits. The former content creator has gone completely offline following widespread bullying and a highly publicized case surrounding several murders, for which she was eventually exonerated (not that it matters to netizens). Getting a glimpse at the aftermath of such a horrific event is fascinating, particularly in how Harder details the way online harassment spills out into the real world. Madison agrees to a podcast interview — during which one of the hosts knowingly quips that what happened to her “reeks of a bad, made-for-TV movie” — only to discover that she’s been set up for even more abuse. Watching Tennant’s face crack as it dawns on poor Madison, for whom the internet was once a safe space, that she has nowhere left to go, is heartbreaking. It does, however, spur her into tracking down CW to finally make her pay.

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On top of all of this, there’s also a male influencer who’s somehow even worse than the lead villain. Jacob (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star Jonathan Whitesell) is a Nick Fuentes-coded MAGA chud who screams into a camera all day long about being an alpha male — but in reality, he’s hopelessly devoted to his long-term girlfriend Ariana (Hallmark star Veronica Long, savoring playing ruthlessly against type). Whitesell resembles a young Jim Carrey, and his similarly plasticine facial features are well-suited to a man whose despicable online behavior is a cynical, and by all accounts highly lucrative, ploy for fame and money. The Canadian actor is so electric in Influencers that he almost steals the show from CW. It’s still a novelty to watch a female villain let loose like this, and Naud seems keenly aware of how lucky she is to get the opportunity to bring CW to such gory life. There’s a sadness behind her eyes that’s glimpsed only in fleeting moments, such as when a man rejects her advances, which humanizes the character. But there’s also no denying that CW is a badass, even if she’s nuts.

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At first, it feels like Harder has bitten off a little more than he can chew with Influencers, but the filmmaker has a remarkably strong, assured handle on the material. He takes sole screenwriting credit this time around, and it shows. The various threads, from the true crime industrial complex to a sly skewering on holier-than-thou Republicans being secret sex freaks (which is so potent chiefly because it feels completely within the realms of possibility), come together in an immensely satisfying way. By continuing CW’s story, the writer-director sets himself an unenviable task by filling in her backstory (including, most notably, a computer science degree that explains a lot) to keep audiences invested while also not giving away too much, so she’s no longer this intriguing enigma of a person.

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Does CW behave badly to survive? As a desperate grasp at connection in a world where she doesn’t quite belong? Or does CW lash out simply because she can? Influencers does what all great horror sequels do: it ups the ante considerably, it increases the body count, the kills become much more elaborate and the writer-director organically deepens the already-established mythology. There’s scope to go even further, but if CW’s story ends here, both Harder and Naud have done her proud.

Influencers releases December 12, 2025 on Shudder.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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