Deinfluencer Review

Deinfluencer review.

Deinfluencer is a bad movie. Not so bad it’s good…not fun in a bad way…a bad movie. What’s most frustrating about the experience of watching Deinfluencer is that it thinks it’s making an important statement. And somehow doesn’t think that statement is “here is a bad movie”.

This review will contain spoilers because getting you to not watch Deinfluencer is more important than protecting its ridiculous secrets.

Deinfluencer

Directed by Jamie Bailey

Written by Jamie Bailey

Starring Marie Luciani-Grimaldi, Simon Phillips, Caylin Turner and Anne-Carolyne Binette

Deinfluencer Review

I’m going to begin with the positive.  Deinfluencer doesn’t have a terrible premise.  If you reworked it into a beat the clock thriller of escalating stunts and humiliation…there’s probably a good horror movie in here.  You’d have to do almost everything differently than Deinfluencer does it, however.  Yes.  That was the positive.

Kelly (Marie Luciani-Grimaldi) is a cheerleader and a social media influencer.  She finds herself captured by a masked man and forced to play a game.  If she doesn’t reach a certain number of likes from her followers within a given time…she will be punished.

Again, there is the nugget of a decent idea in there.  Deinfluencer doesn’t find it.  Budget is obviously in the way of expanding the concept into the wilder ideas you can imagine.  It’s a locked room movie with Kelly, a clock, and an occasional visitor.  Right away you can recognize that the movie isn’t going to deliver the scope necessary for it to work.

Any hopes that it will instead give us a taught smart thriller evaporate within moments of the movie’s opening.  Kelly is decked out in full cheerleader uniform…in case that’s not enough to remind you that she is a cheerleader the script will bring it back up dozens of times.  There’s no subtlety to anything Deinfluencer is going to do.  And it’s only going to get dumber.

Kelly smiles through a picture to upload to her account and fails to reach the required number of likes.  She is knocked out and wakes up with a toe missing.  Supposedly.  What she actually wakes up to is a red liquid on her shoe and no trouble running around for the rest of the movie.  Later, the masked man claims to have removed her kidney…and the small bandage left on her back is apparently enough to convince Kelly this is true…despite this too not hurting her or preventing her from moving around as usual.

It’s all fake, obviously.  Kelly may be too dumb to realize this…but you won’t be.  Also fake are the other women thrown into the room who claim to have been captured.  Everything is a ruse to make Kelly renounce social media.  I’m not making this up.  This is the plot of Deinfluencer. 

Now…the masked man does, at least, have an interesting enough backstory for a horror villain.  His daughter was a social media user who killed herself after a harsh reply from Kelly.  At least I think it was Kelly.  She claims she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and the script, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do a great job fully connecting the dot.  Anyway, this would be a great reason for a movie villain to bring actual revenge on influencers.  This movie goes for the much lower stakes version.  He wants to rehabilitate them.

To insure that Deinfluencer ends in the dumbest way possible…it works.  Kelly joins up with her captor to unleash this implied form of torture on the next unsuspecting influencer.  She’s learned her lesson about the evils of social media, you see.  And is apparently now a complete psychopath doing harm to people like her for the greater good of…less social media influencers.  I’m not making this up either.  This is the message of Deinfluencer.

The actors do what they can with this mess.  Luciani-Grimaldi’s accent breaks through at random times…but there was no time for a second take here.  There’s not much she can pull out of a story where her character has to believe her kidney and toe have been removed while she’s walking around fine.  The masked man (Simon Phillips) gets a moment to shine when he unmasks and does his final monologue.  It’s easily the highlight of the Deinfluencer.  A scene that furthers the theory that a better movie was possible.  A character driven piece would have been better than the middling one focused on utter nonsense.  If it couldn’t rise to the thrill ride of escalating challenges…it shouldn’t have tried.  On the other hand, the payoff is so dumb that everything before it is rendered meaningless anyway.

Scare Value

Deinfluencer takes a premise that could have been interesting and drowns it in heavy handed commentary. A movie built around a social media influencer having to do bigger and bolder things for likes could be a good one…if it took wilder swings. Deinfluencer can’t unleash any big ideas with its locked room setting and phony off screen violence. Budget reasons can excuse some of it…but not the poor dialog and desire to hammer home a message that doesn’t apply to most people.

1/5

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Deinfluencer Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of Deinfluencer, check out another reviewed bad movie: Student Body or Where the Scary Things Are