Review: The Influencer Project ★★★★★
Influencer Chiara King plays influencer Chiara King in this supremely slick horror flick, which gleefully abandons logic in favour of giving audiences an great ride.
★★★★★ The Influencer Project | Dir: Mike Nybroe | 101 Mins | Cert: 18 | From 16th October
Film awards season has a lot to answer for, not least its insistence that films have to be cerebral to be considered worthy of our time. As much as we love an arthouse horror film – thank you A24, you’ve done worthy work – this is a genre that can all too easily forget that you don’t always need to induce a headache to give your audience a good time.
Indeed, where The Influencer Project triumphs is in its winning combination of artful direction and entertainment-driven story. So, while there is a message here – social media is an extractive, exploitative industry ripe for abuse of many kinds – writers Anders Jon, Mike Nybroe & Lars Andreas Pedersen and director (and occasional on-screen presence) Mike Nybroe never allow that message to weigh things down.
Front and centre is real-world influencer Chiara King, giving a truly impressive debut performance as, well, Chiara King. The Influencer Project – produced by original Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez and producer Gregg Hale – takes its lead from King’s own experience of life as an online influencer and exposure to stalkers, and leaps off into a suspense-filled game of cat and mouse, with King very much the prey.
Upon arrival in Copenhagen for a sponsored visit, and trailed by a documentary film crew (led by director Nybroe), King is soon being trolled and tracked by a nefarious, shadowy figure who goes by the handle King Slayer. How much of his talk is bluster? Or are his violent threats the real deal?
It is no light praise to say that King excels at playing a fictionalised version of herself – she is an authentic, enrapturing presence at the heart of this film, delicately balancing privilege with vulnerability, obnoxiousness with likability, and passivity with determination.
There are a lot of very nice touches, with clever editing combining portrait video-feeds, ‘documentary’ footage, and a wider lens which observes both – a Russian Doll of video capture, one inside another inside another. The villainous King Slayer, masked and shadowy, is a malevolent presence all the career for clearly being a real rather than supernatural enemy. And there are jump scares which really earn the name, cleverly timed and spread across the run time to really take advantage of the growing sense of dread.
You may find yourself shouting at the screen – “just leave!”, or “don’t go up the stairs!”, or “wait, this plan is full of holes!’ – but it is testament to how well made The Influencer Project is, and how much fun it is to watch (especially on a decent sized screen in a dark room) that such outbursts feel all part of the experience of enjoying this movie.
The Influencer Project will be in UK cinemas from 16th October, before coming to DVD, Blu-ray and all major Digital Platforms 30th November.
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