“The island, how’d you get off it?” This is a question that hangs over Influencers, given that writer/director Kurtis David Harder’s film is a sequel to his previous Influencer (2022). It is like Aliens (1986) to Alien (1979) or Predators (2010) to Predator (1987) – and not just because of the pluralisation of its title, but because all of these films are concerned with murderous hunting trips in foreign lands.
Influencer ended – and this is a spoiler, but only for the first film – with the serial killing CW (Cassandra Naud) marooned on her own deathtrap island off Thailand. Yet she did indeed, somehow, get off it, and when her survivor Madison (Emily Tennant) led the police back there, no trace of CW was found. It is – and remains – a mystery how CJ managed to escape, but then so many things are mysterious about the tech-savvy, super-scheming psychopath with the prominent facial birthmark, that it is hard to disagree with CW’s similarly questioning response to the question: “That’s what you’re attaching to?” It is like Sherlock Holmes being revived after his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls: you can question it, but without it, there can be no sequel; and the calculating cleverness which CW, like Holmes, has already exhibited throughout her earlier adventures makes plausible, even credible, the notion of her having prepared an escape route for herself. The details seem unimportant and are indeed just part of her mystique.
One mystery about CW is quickly resolved – for we learn at the sequel’s beginning that her full (although perhaps not her real) name is Catherine Weaver, and that for the last year she has been living and loving with her new French girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in France. CW has, so to speak, gone straight and is celebrating her and Diane’s first anniversary with a trip to the South of France, when globe-trotting Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) retriggers CW’s deep-seated, deadly loathing for influencers. Amid the fallout, CW flees to Bali in Indonesia, even as Madison, still suspected of CW’s murders in Thailand, sets about tracking CW down to clear her own name. In a narrative that leaps countries while messing with its own timeline, we know from the first, but chronologically late sequence of Influencers, that there will be blood – and blood Harder certainly delivers, in a film that, coming with an underlying premise already well established in the original, can really let itself off the leash and allow its characters to go full crazy.
With their superficiality, their inauthenticity and their self-centred, self-centring narcissism, influencers are a widely disliked demographic and an easy target. Yet while Harder is absolutely satirising the emptiness of online celebrity and its near-identicalness with notoriety, he is here, as in his first film, unusually sympathetic with his influencer characters, carefully teasing out the fragile humanity beneath their slick façades. Charlotte understands that she is riding a passing wave with her work, is keen to make the most out of her opportunities, and is genuinely kind to Diane and CW. Online, vlogger Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell) is all bare-chested, misogynistic, Tate-a-like machismo, preaching the meninist cause to his fanbase from the boyosphere, and bandying about the metaphor ‘cuck’ as his deepest slur against the uninitiated, but offline, he is sweet, submissive and true to his conspiracy-spouting girlfriend Ariana (Veronica Long), and is in fact a very literal cuck – which is to say that he may be a hypocrite, but he is also decent and honourable, and the viewer is made, uncomfortably, first to abhor him and then to sympathise with him as the male chump in a women’s noirish game.
Meanwhile CW, who vehemently decries influencers and their audiences for being unable to survive a minute without their phones, is addictively glued to her own, to the obvious annoyance of Diane (not that the ever distracted CW even notices), and the fakery and imposture that CW so despises in her designated targets are also very much her own defining characteristics. She is a Ripley – and a Ripper – for the digital age. For underneath all her sophisticated scheming and online manipulation, she is at heart a basic slasher – and once she has been exposed, her madness drops its mask, and she finally gets to perpetrate the messy massacre she has always wanted. The exultant ecstasy of her rampage is a joy to watch, even as the viewer remains unsure whether to root for – or recoil from – CW in her lonely, loveless, one-woman onslaught against a world to which she belongs much more than she imagines.
Influencers had its world première 26 July at Fantasia 2025.
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