Critic Reviews

A taut, tense, of-the-moment thriller with real (reel?) bite.

It may not necessarily reinvent the wheel as far as modern-day technological thrillers go, and only time will tell how the movie will age. But Influencers is still a slick and stylish sequel that exemplifies everything that made the first movie such a fun watch and then some.

Influencers both dwells in and demolishes an online, text-happy, selfie-saturated world, one that thrives on misinformation and FOMO-mongering and drives CW more than a little crazy. Watching poseurs brought down is fun, though. So is Ms. Naud.

Visually sumptuous and brilliantly filled with black humour, Influencers doesn’t pretend to be a healthy genre film. It’s cinematic satiric fun on the level of a Punch and Judy show.

A sadistic delight, just like its predecessor.

So much of “Influencers” works as well as it does because of Harder’s cleverly unpredictable and often remarkably funny script.

The indictment of narcissistic online culture is still little more then an excuse for glam intrigue, and our not-infrequently-lethal anti-heroine’s motivations remain just as cloudy as they were last time. But a good time in enviable vacation spots is guaranteed, with ghoulish demises for many principal figures here served up like caviar on sashimi.

Influencers loosely explores its ideas through a slew of new approaches, which don’t always pay off. This sequel does feel like a much bigger film, both in terms of scope and presentation. But while sustaining the tone and style of the original, these expansions of ideas work to varying degrees. Yet the hiccups present in such thematic explorations never feel like misfires as much as they feel a bit undercooked.