The Influencer Project opens in the exact register it plans to inhabit for the next 90 minutes: the uncanny valley between mockery and exploitation. Director Mike Nybroe casts himself as the director, casts his sound man and cameraman as themselves, and builds a film around British influencer Chiara King playing a version of Chiara King. The formal conceit is genuine — this is a found-footage adjacent exercise in parafiction — but it immediately raises the question the film never quite answers: is the self-awareness doing work, or is it just the alibi? The setup is clean. King's Chiara gets flown to Copenhagen by a tourist board, wrangled by her mercenary manager Alice (Jazmine Summer), and begins generating the influencer content you'd expect — shopping at Baum und Pferdgarten, eating at nice restaurants, doing a livestreamed 'haunted house' visit for the TikTok/Instagram crowd. Then the DMs start. Someone called KingSlayer wants her to stop talking, threatens her with rape and murder, and suddenly there's a stalker thriller grafted onto the lifestyle content. She can leave. She won't. There's $100k in deals on the table. The film's most interesting structural move is also its most honest admission: the comment scroll that runs alongside Chiara's livestreams never stops, not even during the credits. It's the film's real argument — that the audience-as-mob dynamic is the actual horror here, not the villain. Nybroe and co are clearly aware that the ersatz dialectics scrolling past the carnage are the point. The problem is that the film needs the audience to keep watching in exactly the same way. Nybroe invokes Haneke's Funny Games — or rather, the review does, and the comparison is instructive because Funny Games is brutally honest about its own trap: it implicates the viewer directly and refuses to let them enjoy the violence they came for. The Influencer Project wants that credit without paying the price. It enjoys the influence-slop sequences. The product placement is played for laughs but also just... is product placement. The gory third act delivers the genre goods it spent an hour pretending to critique. You can have the cake or eat it. Nybroe wants to do both. What saves this from being pure cynicism is that the central formal tension — a real influencer playing herself inside a fiction designed to critique her business — is genuinely strange in ways the film occasionally earns. King is not a trained actor, and that rawness serves the material in the early sections. There's something uncomfortable about watching someone perform their own commodification at one remove that no hired actress could replicate. Whether King herself understands what she's signed up for, the film wisely leaves ambiguous. But the stalking-as-commentary angle is where the film fumbles most badly. The claim that it was partly inspired by real incidents of stalking is deployed as gravitas rather than interrogated as responsibility. Real stalking isn't a metaphor for parasocial dynamics — it's a crime that disproportionately targets women in exactly the public-facing industries Chiara inhabits. Using that backdrop as texture for a genre exercise, then framing the 'girl-boss fortitude' question as an ironic dialectic, doesn't critique the exploitation economy; it adds another layer to it. The result is a film that's more interesting to think about than to watch, and more interesting to watch than it probably deserves credit for. The bad faith is the feature, not the bug — but Funny Games made that move 30 years ago with more nerve and zero product placement.
