Directed By Mike Nybroe

Starring – Chiara King, Jazmine Summer, Alexandre Willaume

The Plot – A social media influencer (King) travels to Copenhagen for a documentary about her online fame, but when an obsessive stalker begins tracking her movements, she must confront the terror and reclaim her power.

Rated R for strong bloody violence, suicide, and adult language throughout.

The Influencer Project – Official Trailer (2026)

POSITIVES

For his feature length directorial debut, Nybroe has collaborated with the godfathers of the found footage genre, in The Blair Witch Project’s Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, to craft another authentically haunting all-access depiction of unauthorized territory, and while The Influencer Project unfortunately fails to capture the same kind of influential magnitude as its iconic predecessor, there’s tangible proof to Nybroe’s relentlessly gripping direction of his ability to paint a helplessly dreaded environment for his primary protagonist, enacting a socially-conscientious experience that vividly conveys the open-ended vulnerabilities of social media stardom. While Nybroe’s visual impulses pertain to seamlessly replicating the look and feel of the Tik-Tok app, with everything from taste tests to urban decay haunts naturally possessing the kind of videos that you see everyday while scrolling, his most commanding actions stem from painting a very dark and depraved corridor of socialized interacting that makes life as an influencer feel anything other than ideal, and though the film’s centralized goal is to conjure a provocative thriller that entertains an audience above all else, I still appreciate Nybroe’s responsible impulse to appraise urgency and attention to the victimized experiences between both the influencer and their adoring public, allowing the film’s fictional narrative to occasionally delve into the true story aspects that inspired the film. Aside from Nybroe, if there’s anyone else who comes away unscathed to this movie’s overall execution, it’s certainly influencer-turned-actress, Chiara King, who cultivates a gut-wrenching performance so visceral and commanding that it makes it difficult to believe that this is her first acting outside of the world of social media. To be credibly fair, King isn’t always given the best material to brandish a full-proof appeal to the audience, however her expressive emotional registry goes above and beyond towards attaining any semblance of impactful influence to some of the movie’s most anxiously elevated sequences, in turn allowing her to mold an empathetic protagonist who finds ample relatability, even despite her lavish lifestyle prematurely illustrating her as spoiled and even occasionally conceited.

NEGATIVES

What minimal pleasantries that the movie supplanted ends there, however, as for what could be a compelling idea utilized for documentary format is instead wasted in a trope-heavy hodgepodge of a narrative-driven finished product that elicited more unintentional laughter than tense thrills and suspenseful chills, culminating in an embarrassingly awful finished product that still has me baffled by how this movie found a theatrical release in the first place. For starters, the script does little to flesh out Chiara with any sense of lived-in depth or introspective psychology to endear her for 95 minutes to the audience, instead introducing us to the personality in front of the phone screen, which never evolves or expands beyond the frightened outline that the movie merely requires of her. Likewise, the storytelling is plagued by logic leaps and contrivances so egregiously optioned that they make it difficult to approach any vital scene or sequence at face value, particularly Chiara’s reluctance to involve the police once the stalking becomes a pattern, which isn’t even discussed or attempted until nearly fifty minutes into the film. This is matched by the stalker’s ability to supernaturally elude Chiara, her film crew, and her Special Forces-hired bodyguard on more than a few occasions throughout the engagement, where the laughability of their bumbling incompetence to effectively match up his location with the live videos that he’s posting in real-time never moves them even inches closer to an eventual capture, allowing this established conflict to meander egregiously, regardless of the overwhelming advantage in numbers and networking experience that Chiara and her crew have in capably resolving it. To be fair, the script does allow Chiara to mull over the idea that leaving Copenhagen would put an end to all of the madness, but her determinative drive towards fame and riches (50 grand at that) makes it all the easier to overlook death threats and sexual assault on a club dancefloor, so regardless of how many cylinders King’s aforementioned performance is constantly firing on, there’s still an overwhelming amount of stupidity deposited to her character that makes her irredeemable in the empathetic eye, where her own material objectives put her directly in the face of devastation, without compromise. Even when the film attempts something outside of the ordinary, such as an out-of-nowhere developing romantic bond between Chiara and one of the cameramen, it’s not only surmised so suddenly that registers so unimpactful, but also abandoned completely around the movie’s midway point, to make it feel unnecessary in the first place, and while I commend the screenwriter for any semblance of dimensionality to these blandly banal characters, the lack of commitment to their eventual development makes them feel superfluously miscalculated at best, leaving so many of these individualized dynamics lacking the kind of conviction to feel foundational. All of this flimsy writing wouldn’t be a problem if the production managed some semblance of thick and foreboding atmosphere, or even tense thrills and suspenseful chills, however the movie abides by the lowest common denominator of predictable jump scares and compositional jolts from a year’s worst collective score, surmising agonizing annoyance in the form of overzealous shrieks from instrumentals that overinfluence on the candidness of the performances. Even when frights would feel their most effortless, during scenes of enveloping darkness and abandoned destinations, there’s this directional vapidness paid towards sequences that completely absolve them of any semblance of palpable urgency or vulnerability in the disposition of the characters, made unintentionally hilarious by the intrusive influence of on-screen text comments from Chiara’s followers that never fail to assemble the most inappropriate comments at the absolute worst times. Even on a technical perspective, the stomach-churning sloppiness of handheld cellular photography and overzealous editing techniques completely maul the imagery of any inkling of sturdily stable clarity and cohesiveness, making it difficult to properly assess just who and what we’re seeing at all times. What’s especially tragic about this unfortunate depiction is that the production frequently cheats its handheld device capture with still-frame outlining that is framed appealingly with a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, so instead of receiving wide angle photography that breezily captures the extent of its conflictual magnitude, we instead are relegated to claustrophobically condensed frames that overcomplicate the simplicity of what’s being captured, leaving the eyes of the audience mauled by presentational imagery so burdened by velocity and uncompelling camera placements that they leave the interpretation of the movie ripe for motion sickness. Finally, the movie begins its climactic descent around the 75-minute mark of the film, and between a convolutedly sequenced resolution, as well as an exposition dump of a delivered motivation from this stalker, it leaves the enacted finale exhausted by its stacking of late-act developments that doesn’t feel confident with one of the three different endings that it constructs for the audience. This is where the film’s length truly starts to resonate within the particularly crafted story that the narrative is attempting to tell, where the obvious predictability of the stalker’s aforementioned motivation fails to provide a satisfying emotional payoff for the redeemability of the audience, all the while directly compromising the integrity of the movie’s poignant anticapitalist statement about parasocial relationships, which finds it failing to offer any kind of deep psychological or systematic insight into internet cancel culture. As a result, the movie ends unremarkably at the moment when its muddled thud of a lasting impression can be felt the loudest in an auditorium of disappointedly emphasized exhales, choosing to go the way of a neat and tidy resolution instead of the ambitious gut punch needed to sell the cautionary underlining of social media dependency.

OVERALL
The Influencer Project is a worthy idea stuck in the exaggerated execution of another found footage fiasco, and one that ultimately and unfortunately fails to muster anything meaningfully original in the undercooked exploration of a logic-leaping engagement lacking palpable thrills or even competently logical protagonists. While influencer-turned-actress Chiara King delivers physically and emotionally in a thankless role that scatters her minimal opportunities, the film surrounding her Herculean efforts is a creatively shallow slog devoid of genuine scars or enticing atmosphere, leaving this project plundered by unrealized ambition that comes to get the better of it

My Grade: 2.7 or F