The Influencer Project review, ick-inducing thriller exploits overexposed tropes

When influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King visits Copenhagen all the trips to trendy shops and fancy restaurants soon take a turn for the worse

B ritish influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of herself, in this quease-inducing thriller exercise. The ick gets generated not necessarily by the eventual gore that erupts in the last reel, but by the tacky weirdness of the way the film apes the mannerisms of social media reels and streaming nonsense to both satirise the ugly side of the business but also exploit and profit off it at the same time. On one level, it’s an eerily clever exercise in bad faith, like a poor Michael Haneke film (think Funny Games) for gen-Z kicks; on another, maybe it’s just a crappy ripoff of online tropes that have been way overexposed already. Or both.

Anyway, here’s what happens: influencer Chiara gets invited to visit Copenhagen by a tourist organisation, a deal set up by her avaricious manager Alice (Jazmine Summer). Of course, this means practically every moment of her time awake in the city will be filmed, both by Chiara herself on her trusty smartphone, or a camera crew led by director Mike (played by Mike Nybroe, who is also director of The Influencer Project, ha ha); Mike is supported by sound man Daniel (Daniel Parmo) and cameraman Victor (Luca Storm). The early sections turn in all the influence-slop you would expect, with shopping trips to trendy merch vendors such as Baum und Pferdgarten, and meals at fancy local restaurants, and then a livestreamed visit to a “haunted house,” which is the big thing on Instagram and TikTok these days.

But the product placement is somewhat interrupted by moments of real fear (or “real fear”) when Chiara starts getting threatening direct messages (from someone calling themselves KingSlayer) who wants her to stop talking for reasons not clearly explained at first, otherwise he will kill and rape her, not necessarily in that order. This unsurprisingly creates a pall over Chiara’s trip, but if she just quits and goes home she’ll miss out on $100k in deals, so that’s not an option.

So are we supposed to despise Chiara for her greed or applaud her girl-boss fortitude in not being intimidated by a stalker? And what to make of the film’s claims that this was partly inspired by real incidents of stalking? Nybroe and co work the debate into the endless stream of comments we see scrolling alongside Chiara’s livestream, a river of chat that doesn’t let up even when the credits start to roll, ersatz dialectics for an age of digital proliferation.