Review: ‘The Influencer’ outrageously satirizes, well, influencer culture

Influencer culture is simply celebrity culture magnified. As a society, we have always been voyeurs peering into windows like some peeping tom, only now we have way more tools at our disposal. Meghan Weinstein’s The Influencer condemns the vulturistic nature of the digital age, both the exploitation of blind fanaticism and the hunger for fame and fortune we all crave. In the campy indie film, distributed through Breaking Glass Pictures, the writer/director proposes we take a harder look at the dangers of internet power and the deceptions that lie right in plain sight.

Abbie Rose, played by real-life influencer and comedian Kasia Szarek, has it all, and she’s willing to do anything to land her next lucrative deal. To-date, she’s forged quite a partnership with Nutrocon, a popular cosmetics company, despite its storied history of numerous sexual misconduct lawsuits. But Abbie knows her brand. She has her audience, millions of followers and counting, eating out of the palm of her hand. Every Instagram post is curated to polished perfection. Behind the facade, she’s as abrasively privileged as one might imagine, the stereotypically rich white woman who treats her four unpaid interns like garbage and expects them to devote their entire lives to upholding her empire. We never quite get to see if there’s a real person buried beneath her crazy-eyed determination to take down her competitors, and perhaps that’s for the better.

Her world, however, is about to topple to the ground around her when four unknown assailants invade her home, bind and gag her, and force her to do their bidding. Self-proclaimed activists with a vengeful eye to completely expose Nutrocon, and those like Abbie who do nothing to take a stand in the world, the masked bandits might not be the villains after all. They simply want justice for the exploitation of labor and big corporations that fund anti-women’s rights organizations. Abbie’s willingness to ignore Nutrocon’s sick misdeeds makes her complicit, but the game of comments and likes is a twisted one, indeed.

After a night out at the bar, where she runs into the sleazy Justin (Mark Valeriano), who can’t seem to take no for an answer, Abbie returns home right at midnight to upload her weekly Wednesday video. Things quickly go sideways when her computer is hacked, and the vigilantes — known only as Two (Janeva Zentz), Three (Shantell Yasmine Abeydeera), Four (Victoria D. Wells), and Five (Ian Richard Jones), under the watchful command of One — threaten to destroy Abbie’s life by posting unflattering photos if she doesn’t do as they say.

Throughout The Influencer, Abbie, forced to make numerous bogus videos claiming she’s received a brand new box of Nutrocon make-up, soon crumbles into a blubbering mess. Her entire livelihood flashes before her eyes, seemingly destroyed by two photos, one of her nearly nude and another of an unsightly pimple. It’s a wonderfully outrageous premise, and Weinstein’s commentary on influencer culture is as insightful as it is silly. And that’s the charm. In the end, Abbie Rose must make a choice: to live with her conscience or finally stand up for what is right.

The Influencer is now out on VOD.

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