'The Influencer Project' Review: Mediocre Blair Witch Descendant — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Mike Nybroe directed "The Influencer Project" as his debut feature, with "Blair Witch Project" co-director Eduardo Sanchez producing, billing the film as coming from the creators of that 1999 found-footage landmark.
- Chiara King plays herself as a British aspiring singer turned influencer — her "viral kissing video" reportedly amassed 50 million views — who is terrorized by a stalker during a Copenhagen tourism promotion trip filmed by a documentary crew.
- The masked antagonist "King Slayer" posts graphic online threats against Chiara, then tracks her across Copenhagen public locations, uploading photos and video clips from her itinerary to prove his proximity.
- Reviewer criticizes the film's implausibility — Chiara continues nightclubbing and visiting "haunted houses" despite escalating danger — and singles out music supervisor DJ White Shadow for undermining suspense with dance tracks.
- Cinematographer Daniel Parmo's work mixes pseudo-found-footage formats with omniscient widescreen POV to reflect the multiple media through which Chiara's ordeal is captured and posted.
- A prologue features a livestreaming teenage girl (Ronja Hauge Schierup) who performs a drastic act to "go viral," and a closing song by King titled "Bubble Gum" plays over a post-credits tag that teases potential sequels.
Why it matters: The film positions itself on the Blair Witch lineage but Variety finds it lands in the "mediocre middle" of found-footage imitators — competent but unremarkable, with a heroine whose influencer brand makes viewer empathy hard to muster and a stalker whose anti-social-media speech feels less weighty than the documentary "Your Attention Please." For horror fans, it meets subgenre expectations without transcending them; for the influencer-horror subgenre, it adds another forgettable entry rather than a reinvention.
Ask SkimNews
