“Hurry Up Tomorrow” is The Weeknd’s egomaniacal cinematic disaster

Depending on who you ask, Abel Tesfaye — better known by his stage name, The Weeknd — is either a poetic musical genius or a drug-addled lothario. To his credit, this duality is Tesfaye’s doing. He’s spent the better part of the last decade intentionally blurring the lines between his musical persona and his real-life nature. Once a smooth-talking R&B singer with a baby-soft voice to match, his increasing popularity saw his art become outsized, more grandiose. The emotions were buried under witch house trip-hop and then stuffed behind the impenetrable cool of glittering ’80s synths. A musician became a pop star, and suddenly, it was difficult for people to see where Tesfaye ended and the Weeknd began.

If Tesfaye’s new film, “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” is to be believed, the singer has been struggling just as much with reconciling that dissonance as his adoring public has. The movie, directed by Trey Edward Shults, is a fictionalized odyssey through a version of The Weeknd suffering from a bout of insomnia during a world tour, causing his sanity to come undone. Along the way, a young girl named Anima (Jenna Ortega) is pulled into Tesfaye’s orbit, and her creeping, obsessive adoration threatens the singer’s chronic detachment.

With an assist from Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan as Tesfaye’s manager Lee, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” feels intended to be an event movie, a spectacular study of pop stardom with the big names to back it up. But even with its admirable ambition, the film quickly gets lost in its own myth-making — if you can even call “Hurry Up Tomorrow” a film at all. What’s seemingly designed to be a feature-length glimpse into a world-famous musician’s psyche functions like little more than an extended music video, too sparse on dialogue and plot to be a properly engrossing cinematic experience. And just when it feels like things are getting somewhere, when it appears as though there might be a kernel of introspection to take away from the movie, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” bungles its grand finale with all of the subtlety of a badly written pop song.

It’s not as though The Weeknd’s vast discography isn’t ripe for the movie treatment. The sprawling, cinematic character of his songs is what makes “Hurry Up Tomorrow” such an intriguing venture. Something like “Blinding Lights” would feel right at home on the silver screen, used to score a scintillating car chase through the Miami streets on a scorching summer night. And when Shults, who, along with directing the film, co-wrote and edited it, uses the superstar’s irresistible instrumentals in the movie, he marries his beautifully constructed images with sound to create some undeniably gripping sequences. 

But all that flash is of little substance when there’s not much narrative heft to back it up. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is, after all, a whopping 106 minutes long. This isn’t just a concert movie (although Shults captured footage at Tesfaye’s shows) or a one-night-only theatrical event like Miley Cyrus’ visual film for her upcoming album, or Fergie’s less-memorable-but-still-plugged-by-me “Double Dutchess: Seeing Double,” it’s a full-length feature film. While I firmly believe moviegoing audiences should be less averse to slow pacing, there’s an almost prideful lack of explanation for the context of images flickering across the screen. We watch as Anima pours gasoline all over a snowy ramshackle house in the mountains and lights it on fire before driving away. The semi-fictional Weeknd pouts and yells into his phone, looking at pictures in his camera roll and listening to voicemails from his ex (a random Riley Keough voice-only cameo). He plays a concert high off four bumps of cocaine, dead behind the eyes. While some of these sequences are visually arresting, they offer the casual viewer, one who isn’t a diehard Weeknd fan, little to no insight into this world. Even an enthusiast of Tesfaye’s music is unlikely to get anything more from this than they would just spinning one of his albums top to bottom. 

Jenna Ortega as Anima in “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (Andrew Cooper). Things become even murkier when the film contends with its desire to keep viewers at an arm’s length. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is, by all accounts, an extension of the persona Tesfaye has built through his music. The Weeknd is technically Tesfaye’s alter ego. As his career has grown, he’s leaned further into the character work, giving The Weeknd absurd facial prosthetics and bundles of bloody bandages. This shadow self is the boozer, loser and user, the womanizing maniac to Tesfaye’s not-so-hidden steely work ethic. Shults’ film tries to blow this persona up to new heights, but only fills it with hot air. There’s little more to say here that hasn’t been said in The Weeknd’s music already. And, unfortunately, when Tesfaye is acting outside the confines of a music video, his chops are unrefined and fairly laughable. 

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In his first proper acting role, the critically panned Sam Levinson HBO show “The Idol,” Tesfaye stepped into an even more malicious version of the character he plays in his music. He played Tedros, a wannabe music industry impresario who also happened to be a pseudo-cult-leading viper attracted to the shiny fame of Lily-Rose Depp’s pop star, Jocelyn. Somehow, it was ultimately a more effective portrayal of industry poison than “Hurry Up Tomorrow.” The smarm dial was cranked up to an 11, and though his dramatic abilities weren’t much better on HBO, they at least had the cover of other moving parts to soften the blow to Tesfaye’s ego. Here, it reads as though Tesfaye is still scorned from that experience, hoping that playing a variant of himself that he’s used to acting out in his songwriting will communicate his intentions with more honesty. 

Jenna Ortega as Anima and Abel Tesfaye as a fictionalized version of himself in “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (Andrew Cooper), But there’s an intrinsic level of narcissism to that desire that separates the movie’s audience from its star. We’re not watching a film so much as we are someone working through their own insecurities. And while that could be a compelling study of pop stardom, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” lacks the desire to study any perspective outside of Tesfaye’s. To make a successful cinematic analysis of pop stardom, a subject must be considered as a cog in a machine, even if they are based on a real person who ultimately has more autonomy in real life. That’s what made Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux” — which should be considered the preeminent examination of the contemporary pop star — so beguiling: It saw fame as a Faustian pact with the devil. Without any insight into why Tesfaye has created The Weeknd, the film is rendered toothless and inert. If anything, it’s more of a rock opera akin to Ken Russell’s “Tommy” than a narrative film, but “Tommy” has far more memorable visual construction than Shults’ film pulls off, though there’s no shortage of strobe lights and frenetic editing to lull the easily impressed viewer into a state of numbness. 

When Anima and The Weeknd finally meet, things take a brief turn for the surreal. It’s the closest the film ever gets to saying anything, but the extended dream sequence merely gestures at meaning. The two connect during one romantic night, only for Anima’s dreams to be shattered the next morning. When she tries to get The Weeknd to talk to her like a person, she ties him to a bed and forces him to listen to his songs — an objectively funny thing to do to a musician that takes all of the tension out of the scene. Anima extols all of the hidden depth and pain beneath the pop, but it’s impossible to tell what Tesfaye and Shults are trying to get at here. Is Anima’s game supposed to imply that most mainstream audiences don’t understand the profundity tucked beneath those sparkling synths? Or is she supposed to appear deranged for reading so far into a song made by an alter ego? “How much did you take from [these women] just to write another pop song?” she asks.

That’s a question left unanswered. Viewers don’t get a genuine glimpse into that place where The Weeknd ends and Tesfaye begins, and yet, we’re expected to care what happens to him in the film. If you take Tesfaye at his word, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” — both the film and the accompanying album released in January — will be his last work as The Weeknd. “I’ve said everything I can say,” he told W Magazine in 2023. When Anima begins to pour gasoline all over the superstar, it seems as though the film might end on a major climactic punch, one that could make it easier to overlook its many, many flaws. But instead, The Weeknd sings to Anima, and convinces her to put down her lighter, as if to say that Abel Tesfaye has been there alongside The Weeknd the entire time. That message might have some resonance to it if it weren’t something that the average, discerning listener hadn’t been able to figure out for themselves already, especially given Tesfaye’s recent flair for the dramatic. For someone whose late-period career has been built on theatrics, this ending is a decidedly cowardly move. If this is it for The Weeknd as we know him, good riddance.