Influencer

Influencer gives you the most bang for your bad title/bad promo artwork buck.

Don’t be swayed, this one is compelling as hell.

Travel as a storytelling device is something a lot of horrors have explored, including Psycho, Tourist Trap, Red Eye, Turistas, and most recently, Midsommar.

Showcasing different geographies can be really enticing – Watcher, for example, is a neat riff on Hitch’s Rear Window, but set in Bucharest instead of New York. Similarly, Calgarian director Kurtis David Harder takes us to the beaches of Thailand for some visual and cultural intrigue.

Influencer Maddison (played by Emily Tennant) is experiencing Lost in Translation ennui while abroad ’cause her boyfriend is too busy to join her, and constantly updating her socials despite being “stuck” in one of the most beautiful regions of the world.

It’s a reminder of Wittgenstein’s aside that “Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”

She lolls about in a hotel pool, chats bar-side with a scummy old British expat, an overabundance of whom can be found in Thailand, and eventually befriends a mysterious woman, a local named CW.

CW, expertly portrayed by Canadian actress, Cassandra Naud, goes from being a local fixer to a ruiner in short order.

Influencer has a great neo-noir feel and deploys some unexpected storytelling devices.

And speaking of taking you places…Everywhere you think it’ll go, it doesn’t.

**** (out of 5)

[For a further discussion of Influencer, check out the Really Awful Movies Podcast review of the film]