Patricia has already directed the scene before Ashley has agreed to appear in it. Early in Ryan Moore’s Influence, the camera moves close enough to split Cheyenne Perez’s face into competing signals: an animated mouth rehearsing connection, eyes that seem far less convinced. Patricia imagines the encounter she wants, complete with instant recognition and artistic kinship, then carries that private staging into the world as if reality has merely forgotten its cue. The image is simple, but the moral problem is already there. She does not want to meet Ashley. She wants Ashley to enter a version of events Patricia has prepared for her.
That distinction gives this compact psychological thriller its sharpest edge. Patricia is an aspiring writer-director drowning in rejection while editing wellness content for Melissa, an influencer whose manufactured optimism has made cynicism part of Patricia’s day job. Then Patricia fixates on Ashley Ortiz, played by Grace Kaufman, a social-media personality she sees as both muse and escape route.
Patricia writes a screenplay, The Blessing, with Ashley in mind. She follows her, leaves the script at her home, crosses one limit after another, and eventually arrives with a gun. By then the film has stopped asking if Patricia will respect Ashley’s autonomy. It is asking how thoroughly she has learned to rename coercion as artistic necessity.
Moore’s smartest choice is to treat the kidnapping as an extension of Patricia’s creative logic rather than a rupture from it. Patricia becomes director, casting agent, audience, and enforcer inside Ashley’s home. She controls the schedule. She controls the viewing. She controls the reading.
She even subjects Ashley to Sátántangó, a seven-hour black-and-white monument of cinephile seriousness, as if forced exposure to difficult art might improve the moral character of the captive. The joke lands because the mechanism is exact. Patricia cannot distinguish sharing taste from imposing it, or asking for engagement from demanding surrender.
The screenplay read-through pushes the same idea in a different register. A montage of page numbers turns Ashley’s progress through Patricia’s roughly 250-page script into visual attrition. The gag is cruelly efficient because anyone familiar with screenwriting understands the horror before the gun is considered. Yet the scene also clarifies what Patricia actually wants.
She talks about authenticity, self-expression, and being understood, but she has removed the one condition that could make Ashley’s response meaningful: freedom. Approval obtained at gunpoint is still approval in Patricia’s mental accounting. Her delusion is not that Ashley likes the script. It is that consent can be retrofitted after the fact.
Ashley’s profession makes that contradiction nastier. She lives by managing perception, selling a controlled version of herself through endorsements, affirmations, and carefully calibrated access. The coffee-shop scene gives this idea a clean visual shape. Patricia watches Ashley greet people with smiles, hugs, and selfies, only to see them leave once the photographs are secured. Ashley is visible everywhere and known almost nowhere.
Patricia interprets this life as falseness, yet she is performing just as aggressively. Her difference is that she believes her performance is truth. That makes her far less flexible. Ashley knows there is labor in a persona. Patricia thinks sincerity grants her moral authority.
Perez plays that conviction with a frightening lack of distance. Patricia can sound lucid while describing choices that are plainly grotesque, because each violation has been translated into the language of purpose. It makes the machinery of her self-excuse legible.
Kaufman’s work becomes equally important once the hostage situation settles into its uneasy rhythm. Fear cannot stay at one temperature for an entire film, and Ashley gradually shifts tactics. She listens. She reads. She appears to engage with Patricia’s material. At points, the possibility arises that some creative curiosity is genuine. That uncertainty is where the film becomes psychologically useful. Patricia interprets cooperation as proof that her method has uncovered the truth. The audience has stronger reasons to suspect that Ashley has discovered something simpler: Patricia needs a particular response, and performing that response may be the safest available move.
That turns acting into survival. It also muddies the film’s moral perspective in productive ways. The more Ashley seems to participate, the more dangerous Patricia’s certainty becomes. A captor who knows she is hated is one problem. A captor convinced she has engineered mutual understanding is worse. Moore keeps pressing on that distinction without allowing the premise to collapse into a lecture about social media.
The best exchange between the women strips the argument down to its bones. Patricia asks if she would have a duty to save Ashley from a burning building. Ashley snaps back that saving her would be the firefighter’s job. The line is funny because it punctures Patricia’s grandiosity with basic jurisdiction. It also clarifies the film’s view of limits. Caring about someone, identifying with someone, or believing you understand what they need does not transfer ownership of their choices to you. Patricia’s tragedy is that she experiences perception itself as permission.
The contained setting lets Moore and cinematographer Alice Millar keep returning to that problem physically. Ashley’s home begins as the site of a carefully managed private life, then becomes a stage Patricia has invaded and claimed. The visual strategy is strongest when it stays close, attentive to faces, distance, and who controls the frame. Influence does not need aggressive expressionism to make its point. Confinement is already doing the work. The camera watches two women who survive by shaping how others see them, then traps them in a room where neither can fully control the other’s interpretation.
The final stretch is not difficult to anticipate, and the film sometimes asks the viewer to accept heightened behavior in order to keep Patricia and Ashley in sustained psychological contact. That predictability matters less than it might in a thriller built around surprise. The tension comes from watching Patricia convert each new piece of evidence into support for the story she has already written. Rejection becomes misunderstanding.
Fear becomes resistance to truth. Cooperation becomes artistic recognition. By the time the distinction between performance and belief becomes impossible for her to see, the film has made its point with unnerving precision: Patricia’s most dangerous fiction is the one in which another person’s freedom can be edited out.
I can also do the conservative editorial pass against Marcus’s profile, the outline, the opening rules, and the current Review Memory before we move to the verdict.
Influence arrived across North American digital HD, VOD, and physical media platforms on September 4, 2026, distributed by Freestyle Digital Media. The psychological thriller follows a struggling, unacknowledged filmmaker who reaches a breaking point and kidnaps a famous social media influencer, forcing her into a twisted audition for her dream project.
Full Credits
Title: Influence
Distributor: Freestyle Digital Media
Release date: September 4, 2026
Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes (83 minutes)
Director: Ryan M. Moore
Writers: Ryan M. Moore
Cast: Cheyenne Perez, Grace Kaufman, Emily Hall, David Lengel, Hilty Bowen
The Review
Influence
Influence turns artistic desperation, parasocial fixation, and influencer culture into a taut argument about consent and perception. Ryan Moore’s contained direction gives Cheyenne Perez and Grace Kaufman room to make coercion feel psychologically unstable rather than merely sensational, while Alice Millar’s close visual grammar keeps power shifting inside the frame. The destination can be anticipated, and some behavior strains credibility, but the film’s real menace lies in watching Patricia mistake control for understanding.
PROS
- Sharp visual storytelling
- Strong Perez and Kaufman performances
- Dark humor rooted in character
- Smart treatment of consent and artistic control
- Claustrophobic use of space
CONS
- Predictable final stretch
- Some heightened behavior tests plausibility
- Hostage dynamic occasionally depends on generous audience acceptance
