Hurry Up Tomorrow

Hurry Up Tomorrow
Starring Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough
Directed by Trey Edward Shults

Trailers sometimes tell the whole story of the movie and leaves little to the imagination. Others, however, are smart enough to provide just enough titillating tidbits to make you intrigued to see the movie. "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is one such movie with a trailer that is so distorted, disjointed and discombobulating you have no real idea what the movie is about - and to me, it was a major selling point. I like going into a movie not knowing the whole plot, and the trailer for "Hurry Up Tomorrow" seemed to be an A24-esque psychological thriller filled with dizzying camerawork and a highly cerebral plot. Sadly, none of that was true, and the actual movie is a boring snoozefest set to highlight The Weeknd's music at the expense of anything worth of substance.

After enduring a breakup, Abel Tesfaye (Abel Tesfaye) has problems performing for his millions of fans as The Weeknd, as he's also enduring some throat problems caused by stress. His manager Lee (Barry Keoghan) convinces him to keep going with the tour, while Anima (Jenna Ortega) - a woman with severe mental issues - gets concerts for one of his shows. During the show he looses his voice, and Anima sneaks backstage to meet him, leading the two to go on a fun trip to a carnival before going to a hotel, where Anima holds Abel hostage until he tells her the honest truth.

I'm not a huge fan of The Weeknd, so maybe my mileage with this film is hampered because of that, but if the movie is essentially a fictionalized version of yourself, you need to sell it to everyone. Tesfaye fails to do so here, turning "Hurry Up Tomorrow" into a vain, conceited effort to "kill" his alter ego, something that he talked about doing in his January 2025 album, Hurry Up Tomorrow.

If the title seems familiar (and obviously it does), it's because he and director Trey Edward Shults crafted this movie to coincide with the album, essentially making it a two-hour music video. This is where the dizzying camerawork the trailer offers come into play, but those moments are so uninspired it felt boring, dull, and lifeless. Upon release of the album, Tesfaye said "The [upcoming] album is probably my last hurrah as the Weeknd. This is something that I have to do. As the Weeknd, I've said everything I can say. I'll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as the Weeknd. But I still want to kill the Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I'm definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn." So even to that end, he had no idea what he wanted to do - kill The Weeknd, let it live, turn it into something new, just be Abel, he had no idea. That's the movie in a nutshell as well: it had no idea what it wanted to be.

Many people criticize the movie because they didn't understand it, but to me the concept was as simple as it was self-serving: proving his music was essentially continually focused on his toxic codependency with women, and showing it on the big screen. Yet even then, you don't see it. He has arguments with his ex over the phone, and then with psycho fan Anima (which, according to the Jungian concept, is the feminine part of a man’s soul). Basically it's him coming to terms with the music he's made, and the women he's hurt (I guess?) along the way. It's not that it's confusing: it's flatly in your face about it.

Abel Tesfaye cannot act at all, and that's clearly evident when he's going toe-to-toe against an Oscar nominee and one of this generation's hottest leading talents. Barry Keoghan plays his manager who's equal parts angel and demon, who coaxes him to perform for his fans but also supplying him the drugs that lead to his mental distress, but his role is so layered it's engaging to see. Likewise, Jenna Ortega's Anima is a powderkeg (literally, as she sets everything on fire) waiting to explode on Abel for how he treats women (or how women have affected him), and when the two are arguing she's up to 11 and he's barely at a 2, where I laughed out loud at how bad he was trying to act against her.

There's such things as passion projects, where a director, actor, writer, whoever fulfills an activity for enjoyment, creative expression or personal growth. Movies like "Inception," "Silence," and "Three Thousand Years of Longing" were passion projects by acclaimed directors who wanted to do something new and different. Going against that is a vanity project, which is a project undertaken primarily for self-satisfaction, to gain recognition or to showcase one's talents, often without significant commercial or practical value. Movies like "Swept Away," "Glitter," "Battlefield Earth" and "After Earth" fall into this category, and so too does "Hurry Up Tomorrow" - a movie so obviously made with vain glory it oozes it and leaves the audience pleading for tomorrow to come so they could leave the theater.

The Score: D-