Ah, the influencer lifestyle: sun, sand, sponsorships, and social media hijackings that threaten your entire existence. Or maybe I shouldn’t be getting my understanding of things from horror movies. Anyway, let’s talk about Influencer!
Directed by Kurtis David Harder (who also wrote the script, along with Tesh Guttikonda) Influencer follows Madison (Emily Tennant), an influencer on a trip to Thailand who runs into CW (Cassandra Naud), an expat who offers to show her around. But, as they tour together, it becomes clear that CW’s intentions are far from just landing a brand sponsorship for her next holiday.
“Hitchcockian” is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the realm of thrillers, generally as a byword for “pretty good”, but Influencer is one of the few that really earns that descriptor. From the first character we follow serving as a mere intro to the story (à la Pyscho), to the moral ambiguity of the cast of characters to the villain serving as our functional lead, the hallmarks of Hitchcock are all over Influencer, but brought forward to a modern backdrop with stylish panache and passion.
And speaking of the villain serving as our lead, let’s talk a little about Cassandra Naud as CW. It’s such an excellent performance, the lynchpin of the film, really – CW is amoral and slippery and hard to read, but instead of landing in “frustratingly blank” territory, Naud imbues her with a cold, dark presence. It can be hard to pull off this villain-as-lead trope, given that it asks you to invest in a bad guy, but Harder and Guttikonda draw you in via two perspectives – first, that of her victim, with flashes of her true intentions, and then, of her, giving you the inside scoop on how she’s pulled it off. You see her from the outside in, then the inside out, and both stories build her out into a compelling and fascinating bad guy.
And how she pulls it off is one of the most entertainingly inventive aspects of the movie. I’ve written a bit about why social media has served as such an effective trope for the world of horror to tap into before, but Influencer approaches it in a slightly different way than I’ve seen before. The influencers of the title blend their personal and professional lives to create a brand that’s basically hollow, and the space that leaves for CW to step in and claim it makes for a fascinating twist on the identity theft thriller. The way that CW uses the trust we put in the identities of people on social media to her own ends is genuinely unsettling – exploiting the façade of truth put forward by these influencers to cover her tracks – and an inventive take on the social media horror genre. The social media identity is a husk, a mask that someone else can pick up and wear at a moment’s notice – and, if your identity is so profoundly tied up in that online version of yourself, where does that leave you?
Influencer is a tight, compelling, and decidedly fresh thriller that takes classic tropes of the genre and puts a modern spin on them without losing their bite. Now, about those brand deals…
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 