FrightFest review – Influencers
Even if they aren’t characters in horror movies, the lifespan of an influencer is alarmingly brief – which adds an air of desperation to most online personalities, who are also among the very few professionals actually at risk of being replaced by AI. Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer was one of many, many horror films which put influencers in jeopardy – heave a brick at the FrightFest discovery screen over the last few years, and you’ll probably hit a film with influencers stalked, slashed, haunted or sacrificed for likes. It produced the most memorable villain – if she is a villain – of the cycle, CW (Cassandra Naud), a woman with a distinctive facial birthmark which adds to her glamour but also makes her very identifiable when she’s on the run (which she always is).
In Influencer, CW was hanging out in Thailand, targeting pretty vapid freeloaders the way Tom Ripley targeted the idle rich – she dabbles in computer-assisted identity theft but seems also to be working off grudges. At the end of the film, she was in a tight spot after the tables were turned by Madison (Emily Tennent) – but Influencers picks up a year or so later, with Madison believed by the internet to be guilty of CW’s crimes if officially exonerated … and CW lying low in France with a new girlfriend (Lisa Delamar, from Survivre) and a fairly enviable lifestyle. But an encounter with a hotel room-gazumping influencer (Georgina Campbell, from Barbarian*) awakes her old urges to visit furious punishment on the ‘like and subscribe’ brigade – which prompts a development possibly inspired by Anthony Mingella’s rather than Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley and a relocation to Bali.
Madison is now on the vengeance trail, becoming an internet sleuth the way she became a survivalist, and in an affecting development CW’s only confidante is an AI-generated ghost she hasn’t programmed to remember the bad times. New in her sights is Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), a glib men’s rights influencer who is puppetmastered by ‘new right’ queen bee Ariana (Veronica Long). Jacob is malleable rather than evil – his secret shame is that he’s a literal cuck – and is put in a quandary when Madison and CW both tell him that the other is their stalker and a homicidal maniac. It builds up to a bloodbath in a magazine-layout-perfect Bali retreat, which is wittily filmed – the action continues under the end credits as a drone-cam soars over the landscape – but also properly gruesome.
Again, Naud is the beating heart of the film – she’s a monster, but she feels deeply amid so many shallow people, and we get a sense of the tragedy which drives her. It’s difficult to parody influencer culture/behaviour since it’s already extreme – but Harder takes venomous jabs at fundamentally unlikeable people begging for likes while hinting, though Jacob and Ariana, that just hawking holidays and products people got for free is a silly side-issue compared to the cultural damage done by influencers who are as likely to call for riots or lynchings as shill fragrances and exotic getaways.
*Does Harder just hang about the FrightFest picture wall to cast supporting roles?
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