Hurry Up Tomorrow movie review (2025)

The Weeknd, AKA Abel Tesfaye, has been teasing his obliteration for years. Listen to just about any track or album from the platinum-selling pop star, and you’ll find lyrics detailing angst, despair, self-destruction, hedonism as a form of divine punishment. He’s always trying to destroy himself, and remake himself into something new. The last few years, that’s been clear in his attempts to transition from music to the screen; see his cameo in “Uncut Gems,” or his much-derided turn in Sam Levinson’s obnoxious, over-the-top HBO series “The Idol.” But with “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a multimedia project that includes an album that came out this past January and an accompanying film directed by “Waves” and “Krisha”‘s Trey Edward Shults, he wants to literally and figuratively set “The Weeknd” as a persona on fire and walk away from it all. If only the film that expressed that ideal had a shred of invention or authenticity behind it.

Tales of self-destructive pop stars are nothing new—hell, Brady Corbet nailed something much more melancholic and profound with similar material in “Vox Lux” just a few years ago. But where Tesfaye thinks he’s baring his soul for his fans with “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” the film inadvertently reveals the depths of his self-delusion, building an overlong, aimless vanity project meant to launch a new phase of his career but will only satisfy folks who’ve already decided they’ll like it because of their existing affiliation with the artist.

The film, such as it is, begins with a voicemail voiceover from an unknown girlfriend (voiced by Riley Keough), her last message before leaving him: “A good person wouldn’t have done that to someone they love.” That’s the given circumstances Tesfaye is drifting into, as he continues on a grueling tour that’s testing his mental health, his patience, and his vocal cords (cue the on-the-nose metaphors about an artist losing, then regaining, their voice). But he can’t focus on any of that, because this breakup is messing with his mind and he drowns his sorrows in pills and anonymous sex. Never mind that the script, by Shults, Tesfaye, and Reza Fahim, gives us no way to view her, or that relationship, beyond anything besides The Weeknd’s possessive outbursts; she’s an abstraction, like everyone else in his life. The only constant he truly has is Lee (Barry Keoghan), his manager and hype man who is both angel and devil on his shoulder. “You’re not human!” Lee stresses, as he tries to get Tesfaye to go on stage for one more show even as his voice breaks.

Meanwhile, an unnamed woman (Jenna Ortega) dumps gasoline all over what is presumed to be her family’s ranch home out in the boonies and sets it on fire. We know little else about her, other than seeing a Weeknd concert ticket on her phone. And when the two have a fateful meeting at a Halloween concert where Tesfaye’s voice finally gives out, it sets the latter to finally have the reckoning his career and life choices have been building towards. (Actually, I lied; the credits list Ortega’s character as ‘Anima,’ as in the Jungian concept of the feminine part of a man’s soul. Never let it be said The Weeknd is a master of subtlety.)

That their collision happens a cool hour into “Hurry Up Tomorrow”‘s 100-minute run time (you’ll be muttering the title’s first two words a lot as you watch) is a testament to the baffling self-absorption of the project. Shults, who seems to be leaning harder into esoteric arthouse stylings after his more grounded early works, fills the frame with a lot of overwrought A24-styled flourishes; the 35mm film look, the shifting aspect ratios, the constantly spinning 360 camera that twirls inside vehicles to the point of exhaustion. When the camera’s not spinning, it’s shoved right in Tesfaye’s sweat-beaded face, scanning for signs of life or nuance in his performance; alas, we find none. Even in the muddy concert segments, where we see him perform his “Thriller”-like party anthem “Wake Me Up,” the camera hardly ever takes its lens off The Weeknd’s face. I guess there’s something symbolic in there about how solipsistic his own career is, where he barely registers the audience he performs for. It’s all about him.

Ortega does her best to uplift her half of the movie, and she tears energetically into a third-act turn towards violence that nakedly evokes Stephen King projects like “The Shining” and “Misery”; she’s the obsessed fan breathlessly explaining his own songs back to him, and what they mean to her, and why they should be together forever. It’s like Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” if he was detailing the appeal of Huey Lewis and the News to Huey Lewis. It’s a jolt of energy in a film that sorely needs it, but it comes long after you’ve checked out, and pulls its apocalyptic punches in the final minutes anyway.

“Hurry Up Tomorrow” takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame. If you’re looking for a pop star prodding at his image, turn to the far superior “Better Man“; at least Robbie Williams has a sense of humor about his personal foibles. The Weeknd expects you to clap when he weeps.