Copenhagen is to die for in Mike Nybroe’s decently crafted if over-familiar debut feature, in which Brit influencer Chiara King (playing herself) gets menaced by one very hostile, fictitious non-fan. An opening text announcing “This film is influenced by real events” provides the first and last moment of inspiration in “The Influencer Project,” whether the joke is deliberate or not. Mike Nybroe’s debut feature is far from the first horror movie to posit practitioners of the titular digital-age profession as a killer’s prey, and surely won’t be the last.
Billed as coming “from the creators of ‘The Blair Witch Project’” — and that film’s co-director Eduardo Sanchez is a producer here — it could be worse. Yet despite not strictly hewing to the found-footage template established by the 1999 sleeper hit, this opus lands smack in the mediocre middle of umpteen forgettable imitations churned out ever since. British aspiring singer turned social media personality Chiara King get an “introducing” credit playing herself in staged circumstances, terrorized by a stalker while on a promotional trip to Copenhagen.
She, like the film, is competent without leaving much of an impression — neither a star nor a franchise is born here. Still, horror fans up for seeing anything new in the countdown to Halloween will find this new “Project” meets basic subgenre expectations, even if it does nothing to elevate or transcend them. A prologue finds a teenage girl (Ronja Hauge Schierup) announcing to livestream viewers that “Today is the day we are going to go viral.” She then performs a drastic act that guarantees only the saddest kind of fame.
Selling herself as a contrastingly upbeat life-lover is twentysomething Chiara, whose own “viral kissing video” (which we don’t actually see) apparently kickstarted an online celebrity with 50 million views. That got her a manager, Alice (Jazmine Summer), along with lucrative product tie-in deals, and now an invitation to visit the Danish capital as part of a tourism campaign. In exchange, she’ll post her own typical videos while shopping, sightseeing, clubbing, sampling select restaurants, and so on.
She’ll also have a local documentary crew filming her every move, its principal personnel cameraman Mike (played by director Nybroe) and younger assistant Victor (Luca Storm). All this is innocuous enough, Chiara included. Alice tells her, “Your followers love you being you.” But in a dramatic context, her persona as a nice, pretty but relatably ordinary young woman on perpetual holiday doesn’t make for a particularly interesting heroine.
Of course, peril soon surfaces to sully the endless trying-on of new frocks and posing in front of monuments. A mysterious user account for one “King Slayer,” whose profile photo is a sinister mask, begins posting graphic threats of what he’ll do to her if she doesn’t “stop talking” online. Then it becomes clear that he is tailing her in public places, uploading photos and video clips from her recent itinerary to prove it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
