Crew
Director/Screenplay – Kurtis David Harder, Producers – Chris Ball, Jack Campbell, Rebecca Campbell, Kurtis David Harder, Micah Henry & Taylor Nodrick, Photography – David Schuurman, Music – Avery Kentis, Visual Effects – Pixel Piranhas (Supervisor – James Anthony Young). Production Company – Shudder/Jackrabbit Media.
Cast
Cassandra Naud (Catherine ‘CW’), Emily Tennant (Madison White), Jon Whitesell (Jacob Sullivan), Lisa Delamar (Diane Moreau), Georgina Campbell (Charlotte Smith), Dylan Playfair (Cameron Prescott), Veronica Long (Ariana), Andrew Barrett (Garrett), Osric Chau (Quintin), Vincent Serrano (Hotel Clerk), Isabelle Perrodeau (Beatrice Moreau)
Plot
The psychopathic CW is now living in France with her girlfriend, barista Diane Moreau. While they are away for the weekend, they encounter the influencer Charlotte Smith, whereupon CW kills her. Meanwhile, Madison White has been cleared of the murders in Thailand that were conducted by CW. Nevertheless, people still believe she was responsible and she is humiliated on livestreams and receives threatening phone calls. In a determination to track down CW, Madison follows clues that lead her to CW’s whereabouts in Bali. She meets the male influencer Jacob Sullivan in a bar and shows him CW’s photo. Not long after, Jacob encounters CW and approaches her with Madison’s accusations. She quickly turns this around and claims that Madison is stalking her and seeks refuge with him.
I had quite a liking for Influencer (2022), directed by Kurtis David Harder and starring Cassandra Naud as a psychopath who kills and steals the identities of social media influencers. Naud was appropriately cold and ruthless, while the film doglegged about with a number of sharp and effective twists.
I expected Influencers to be another Influencer. It is in many ways, but it also isn’t. Aside from Cassandra Naud doing her thing again, there is another long preamble to the action – a prologue of thirty minutes before we even get the credits just like there was in the first film. Although, unlike the first film, where you expect the prologue to come with sharp twists and surprises that reverse expectations, this never happens. The two other people we meet in the prologue – Georgina Campbell and Lisa Delamar – get killed exactly as we expect them to. On the plus side, this section does have the benefit of being relocated to the beautiful French countryside.
The plotting in Influencers is not quite as tight as the first film. The script is interesting in that it gives time over to male influencers – in this case, Jon Whitesell in a character somewhat modelled on Andrew Tate (although this is a character that the film is far less willing to condemn than the opprobrium Tate has attracted in the real world). But there are not as many of the sharp whiplash twists that we received in the latter section of Influencer here.
This also does the go back in time to tell how we got there story, but only to tell the story of the pre-established relationship with Lisa Delamar that we saw at the start of the film, a section that could have been dropped and make no difference to the film. The rivalry between the two girls as Emily Tennant sets out to track CW down has much more teeth to it, but never gets pushed to any tension until near the end. Here the film does at least lead to a memorable improvised fight scene between the two girls.
I had issues with some of the plausibility of the tech on display in Influencer and felt that Harder was requiring much more stretches of plausibility here. Of being able to track location simple from the background of photos on a social media profile. Or where we see that Cassandra Naud has somehow recreated girlfriend Lisa Delamar’s personality as some kind of A.I. on her computer.
Canadian director Kurtis David Harder who had previously made the non-genre Cody Fitz (2011), the SF film Incontrol (2017) and the horror film Spiral (2019). Harder has also produced a number of other genre works including Fake Blood (2017), Still/Born (2017), Knuckleball (2018), What Keeps You Alive (2018), Harpoon (2019), Z (2019), Superhost (2021), Bodycam (2025) and Shadow of God (2025).
Trailer here