Influencer (2022) starts by showcasing its often non-linear, inventive time structure, opening on the vision of a young female body, face down on an otherwise picturesque island beach. We then zip to something else: a motivational speech from a young woman, a social media influencer called Madison (Emily Tennant). Ah, this is content for her channels; she’s travelling solo in Thailand, talking about how good travel is ‘for the soul’ and how people need to ‘surrender to the moment’. Thing is, her demeanour off-camera doesn’t quite mirror those feelgood platitudes. She seems bored, miserable even. What is the deal? In fact, you won’t be able to do anything but wonder – who was the young woman lying dead on a beach at the very beginning? Was it her? Was that Madison?
What we are clear on is that Madison is starting to have doubts about the whole online career thing. In a chat with a friend back home, she says she’s starting to rethink it, aware that it has a really short shelf life anyway – even if it does, temporarily, grant her access to aspirational products and a very receptive audience. Neither does it protect her from the usual issues of fending off the unwanted attentions of men who feel that any solo woman owes them conversation and company, as we see at her hotel bar. Luckily for her, she runs into another young woman called CW (Cassandra Naud) who helps her make her excuses; after that, they become close friends.
The trip gets instantly better; it almost matches up to the claims Madison has been making about it all along. But of course, this is the high point before the film’s first sinister turn. Madison and CW get back one evening for Madison to discover her room has been burgled; her passport is gone, meaning she has to rely more and more on the (unusually generous) kindness of strangers while she sorts out a new one. But she is not well-equipped to deal with problems like this; she’s young, naïve, and it turns out that the whereabouts of her passport is just the first big question raised by the film, in an intriguing succession of questions.
If you feel that, early on, you get a strong sense of where all of this is going – if you’ve seen enough films about what befalls a stranger in a strange land that you feel you can confidently predict the outcomes – then it’s almost certain that the film will nonetheless be able to surprise you, you jaded horror viewer you. It has an incredibly deft touch, happy to subvert audience expectations (in fact, the opening credits roll at 25 minutes in, which shows how carefully and unusually this film is constructed). That deftness also imbues the film with a feeling of queasy disorientation, especially as its twisting, shifting timeframes kick in. It’s a massive risk when a film opens with a dead body – how are we going to meaningfully link back up to that scene? – but, as it turns out, the film is able to handle it very cleverly. It’s also impressive how effectively Influencer can raise your heartbeat; at certain points, it’s almost unbearable.
The film knows its subject matter; it has captured the modern tendency to photograph first, experience later. It also debunks questions of entitlement as it picks away at the disconnect between manufactured self and ‘real’ self. Of course, there’s always been a divide there, but it’s been granted vast new levels of reach by the rise of social media, together with the deluded levels of self-importance which often accompany it. But it’s aspirational because the influencer lifestyle can, even for a short blaze of glory, grant immense power and wealth. These are interesting times indeed, ripe for filmmakers to exploit. Alongside all of this, the Thailand locations are beautifully filmed, offering wide open space and unbearable claustrophobia in turn. There are some great roles for women here too, which riff on another bunch of cultural expectations. All in all, the film’s cast of flawed, often painfully naïve but often belligerent characters works very well.
If there’s any point when the film’s premise begins to strain at all, then it’s towards the end, which is perhaps unfortunate – though, against the film as a whole, it’s pretty minor. Ultimately, when the end credits roll, you have to ask: could the film have done better? I’d say, no. This is an often ingenious, deeply unsettling, very modern horror. Influencer perfectly captures a moment in time. Ten years from this date, we’ll be vastly unsettled by something else; Kurtis David Harder’s film captures terrors which are only possible, like this, right now. It’s immensely, impressively done.
Influencer is available on Shudder from today: 26th May 2023.