I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody
It is uncommon to find a thriller from the 2020s that feels connected to the fundamentals of the genre as established by greats like Alfred Hitchcock — immersive, tightly-plotted, character-driven suspense — and also engages with the specific, techno-dystopian ways that modern day life is so alienating. Drop from last year was one such example, and Influencer from a couple years earlier belongs on that same shelf. It’s a lean, crafty contraption with a few really deft twists and turns. While it’s ultimately more of a glossy exercise in craft than anything insightful or memorable, it’s a darn good time while it runs.
Madison (Emily Tennant) is on a solo trip through Thailand, performing bliss for her legion of followers with detached, fake smiles. Her boyfriend has bailed on the trip, and so despite getting thousands of likes and affirming comments, she’s completely isolated. Then she meets CW (Cassandra Naud), a fellow traveler who has no phone, no Instagram feed, and no visible interest in her image or ego. This disarms Madison, and she accepts CW’s invitation to join her for some events off the tourist grid and into a more authentic vacation, not realizing someone just out of sight has been paying more attention to her every move than she realized. I’ll stop there, as the film’s biggest pleasures are structural, i.e. in setting up and teeing off great moments and payoffs.
Indeed, it’s refreshing to encounter a film that has thoroughly polished its narrative structure into a little surprise machine. For example, Influencer withholds its title card for a good twenty-odd minutes where its appearance accentuates the film’s first big left turn (a la Twinless), reframing our expectations: Everything we just watched retroactively becomes a prologue. From there it keeps rotating its point-of-view character rather than settling on a single protagonist, so your sympathies get reassigned every couple of reels without the sharp breaks of, e.g., Weapons. It’s a nifty trick, especially when pulled off as smoothly as it is here. Director Kurtis David Harder, working from a script he co-wrote with Tesh Guttikonda, pulls it off with a control that makes it seem like a simpler story than it actually is.
A sloppier version of this exact film would have you cataloguing plot holes and dum-dum decisions the entire runtime; this one stays heightened but always plausible, its characters behaving like actual people even at their worst. It’s the Patricia Highsmith trick: unnerving isn’t that someone does something bad, but how each individual step looks on the way there.
The satire of shallow social media-driven life is present in quantity and tone that feels just right for the film’s ambitions: The movie includes a few baked-in and well-observed jabs at the sponsored-content conveyor belt and the ambient dishonesty of a curated lifestyle feed, but Influencer never descends into the lecture or caricature you might expect from its title.
What actually interests the film is how the influencer lifestyle works in providing witness to a life: We now assemble a forensic record of ourselves — timestamped, geotagged, corroborated by an audience of strangers. Then Influencer finds terror and tension in the ways that record can be authored, almost in full, by someone who isn’t really us. It’s an unnerving concept, and it suggests without directly stating the idea that people who define themselves by their virtual personae live shrunken, unremarkable lives even as they appear, on the outside, to be living to the fullest: They go to exotic locations, undertake photogenic adventures, and bask in luxury, and yet they are, as humans, disposable commodities. I found some kinship between the film and HBO anthology series The White Lotus, chasing similar quarry from a similar cultural moment: Both consider through twisty, travel-themed thriller stories the way luxury is an illusory intoxicant that masks the moral and social rot that follows the rich wherever they go.
I have a longstanding rule (called the Forgetting Sarah Marshall Rule) that any movie shot on location somewhere gorgeous, somewhere that I immediately wish I was, gets bumped up a notch, and Influencer’s breathtaking footage shot in Thailand is a beneficiary. Even fully engaged in the story, part of me was already in the screen, ordering a fruity drink with a little umbrella in it. David Schuurman’s photography stages most of the action in flat, bright daylight, almost like a credit card commercial. This look is part of the movie’s overall slick, glossy texture, which makes sense for a story about the seductions of a beautiful, curated life, though it does build the sense that this is a film shallow in substance.
Among the film’s high points is Naud’s performance. CW is a terrific anti-heroine, and Naud (a formally trained dancer) has a beguiling and confident presence. She has a distinctive facial birthmark that fits in to the story quite well: in a film full of faces well cast as bland conventional beauty, CW’s is the one that doesn’t feel like it was designed by an algorithm. Naud keeps CW human, too, rooting the character in insecurity. It’s great writing when she gets to vicariously live the influencer lifestyle through Madison and others, and it’s great acting when we detect just how much inner conflict it causes CW without the film overstating it: She both covets and resents the manufactured, uncomplicated beauty and bliss of social media stars.
And yet, Influencer still feels closer to a magazine article than a gritty novel. It’s so zippy and its characters so exterior that it ultimately fails to sink in a deep hook. Great movies can give us sharp, pulpy plotting while also socking us in the gut. Influencer only nails the first of those. Alas; not every movie is The Talented Mr. Ripley. Still, Influencer is crafty and tense and confident enough to keep you gripped to the loopy final scene.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.