Hurry Up Tomorrow

Let’s get this out of the way: I am a massive fan of The Weeknd. The kind who was blasting House of Balloons on his iPod Nano at 11 years old, way before Abel Tesfaye even had a face attached to those haunting vocals. I’ve been on this journey since 2011, though I was admittedly way too young to be jamming to “Glass Table Girls” or sitting with “Wicked Games”. Fourteen years later, I have attended three of his tours, listened to every album repeat, and even got through his divisive TV show The Idol. So when I heard that Tesfaye was teaming up with Trey Edward Shults, the director of one of the most immersive, daring films of the last decade in Waves, excitement was an understatement for what I felt. On paper, this movie felt tailor-made for me. And the truth is, I loved parts of it. I was conflicted about others. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a hot, gorgeous, indulgent mess.

Let’s rewind. The Weeknd’s career has always felt mythic, borderline surreal. He started as a kid from Toronto who dropped out of school and left home one random weekend to find himself. He emerged from the shadows with the Trilogy tapes, cultivating a fanbase thanks to his angelic vocals, genre-defying sound, and an artistry that refused to play by pop’s rules. From the red-suited horror pop of After Hours to the nostalgic spiritual transmissions of Dawn FM, Tesfaye has built his career on reinvention. Just when we thought his latest trilogy might be coming to a close, tragedy struck. On September 3, 2022, in the middle of belting “Alone Again” at a sold-out SoFi Stadium, Abel Tesfaye lost his voice. This voice that shattered streaming records, redefined R&B, and headlined the Super Bowl was somehow gone. The stadium went silent. Tesfaye exited. The crowd booed.

After some time away sitting with those conflicting emotions and recovering his artistry, he returned not just with a new album, but with a film inspired by that moment of collapse and reinvention. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a sleep-paralysis-fueled nightmare of coming face to face with his past and the roadblocks on the way to truly healing and accepting one’s outcome. Hurry Up Tomorrow is part music video, part experimental character study, part therapy session, and all Weeknd.

However, the film would collapse without its singular atmosphere. Thankfully, Trey Edward Shults brings his singular vision to the silver screen once again after a 6 year break. With this project, he earns his second career lifetime pass from me. Waves was an emotional brick to the chest that has stuck with me for several years now. With Hurry Up Tomorrow, he has crafted a one-of-a-kind audiovisual odyssey. Shults proves again that no one’s brain is coming up with visuals like his. What I love about Shults’s work is how immersive it feels, as if you’re renting a room inside the protagonist’s brain. Every thought, every emotion, every swirling 360 shot is felt in full force by the audience member. And when paired with cinematographer Chayse Irvin, the result is lush 35mm grain, painterly frames, and long, breath-stealing takes. This man simply does not know how to make an ugly movie. His kinetic editing practically makes the film’s first half. Between intense party scenes, glorious music montages, and razor-sharp cross-cutting between timelines, his editing creates an intentional chaos that shines as the film’s best feature. 

On the other hand, I will admit that Tesfaye’s inner battle between the character he puts on for the world to enjoy and his true self who is upset about the way his life is progressing doesn’t hit as hard as it should. The first manifestation of his turmoil is Lee (Barry Keoghan), his chaotic, grinning manager who serves as an embodiment of the “push through the pain” masculine ideal he must uphold no matter what. Meanwhile, Jenna Ortega’s Ani embodies the feminine, intuitive, sensitive half of his psyche. She allows Tesfaye to feel his emotions at their fullest and challenges him on the way he lives his life. Together, Lee and Ani symbolize a synth-soaked identity crisis. But while the intent is clear, the execution occasionally stumbles. 

Some moments feel like a high-budget music video, but when the film swings hard, it usually connects. The clearest example of this is its ending, which has Tesfaye do an a-cappella performance of the title track. This moment forces him to address his conflict with Ani head-on in a nearly unbroken take. The screen is filled with his face, and we realize that he cannot show his pain without the one vessel he has always relied on for self-expression: his voice. There is no beat or production, just Tesfaye’s voice suspended in silence. It is haunting. Given the film’s emotional arc and Tesfaye’s real-life grappling with the loss of his voice, public rejection, and creative burnout, it hits hard. Yet, had the rest of the film matched the focus and clarity of both this ending and the album it inspired, the moment could have been even more impactful.

Though the internet may have you believe otherwise, the acting in this film is decent. Tesfaye’s performance is a step up from his previous work in The Idol. His deadpan comedic timing in particular gets showcased here. While this scene has been made fun of out of context, when he snaps “shut the fuck up” with such deadpan surgical precision, the whole theater lost it in all of the best ways. In context, it is one of the best bits of acting in the whole film. Some of his dramatic moments edge into melodrama, but there’s still beauty behind the madness, especially in a scene where he pleads on the phone with an ex before taking the stage. It’s messy, but it feels real.

And while this is very much a two-hander, Jenna Ortega’s Ani doesn’t quite hit the emotional highs promised by the marketing. Ortega is never bad (she just keeps ending up in bad movies), but here, Ani feels more like a metaphor than a fully realized character. I enjoyed the metaphorical burning of his “past life” in her introduction scene and how her and Tesfaye’s connection progresses into a more toxic reflection of one’s self-perception. The seeds of a richer story are there, but on screen, they never quite blossom. That said, Jenna Ortega doing a full American Psycho monologue about The Weeknd’s discography, complete with a deadpan breakdown of my beloved Dawn FM’s “Gasoline”? Best scene in the movie hands down.

As a The Idol apologist, I’ll say that while I didn’t love that show, it wasn’t the career-ending disaster the internet craved for it to be. It wasn’t a cultural reset, sure, but it wasn’t a dumpster fire either. Hurry Up Tomorrow has been similarly torn to shreds, but it is self-aware, indulgent fan service that leans into this fact with flair. For all its flaws and untapped potential, this film is a wild, unfiltered swing from two of the most fascinating creatives working right now. I’d rather watch them aim for the moon and miss spectacularly than play it safe and land in boring mediocrity.

6/10