For someone like me, approaching Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) came with a few Herculean tasks. The most predictable of them was simply to make a good movie that portrays The Cult of The Weeknd™ in a way that resonates. Few artists over the past 15 years have established a platform quite like him. He’s created a perfect mythology, all while hiding behind a persona that’s indebted to cinematic ideologies that push serious topics into the realm of the fantastical. In theory, The Weeknd shouldn’t have struggled to transcend music into film. Yet it’s impossible to not recognize the damage that The Idol had on his reputation. Even if “Blinding Lights” remains one of the most popular songs of the modern era, he’s become increasingly divisive and – depending on who you ask – up his own ass.
The biggest reason that Hurry Up Tomorrow sat high on my list of anticipated films was because of his ambitions. Few artists have mixed creative potential with mainstream success while producing a trio of albums that serve as a collective concept record of Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy.” It’s a world where Jim Carrey hosts radio shows, where Lana Del Rey plays a siren in the bowels of The Weeknd’s afterlife, where frank discussion of depression and mental illness is a feature and not a bug. In theory, The Weeknd is such an authentic voice in the music sphere that a film project embodying his aesthetic should’ve been a home run. After all, this was billed as his swan song. Gone are the days of The Weeknd. Say hello to Abel Tesfaye and whatever that means.
Having built a sonic world that encapsulates a limitless potential, I wanted to believe Hurry Up Tomorrow would be redemptive. After all, Trey Edward Shultz has been a reliable director in the A24 stable for a decade now. His knack for music curation has produced some excellent moments throughout his filmography and made me hope that he’d tap into the warped mind of The Weeknd and pull out a sense of clarity. After all, this would be the moment (as unrealistic as it is) to openly declare that the reason The Idol failed wasn’t Tesfaye, but creator and HBO whipping boy Sam Levinson. It was the second shot, a call for redemption made all the sweeter because “Hurry Up Tomorrow” remains my favorite album of the year and a testament to his immersive pop.
To put it simply, the soundtrack is better. It’s not even close how much more alive The Weeknd is on wax. Part of it is just that audio has more interpretive qualities that allow the rough edges to be compensated for. As heard throughout the film, the synth-heavy production by Daniel Lopatin is infectious, filling theater speakers with this amazing rave-like quality that is matched by flashing lights meant to throw the viewer into a debaucherous headache. As a work of stimulation, it never quite gets there, though you can’t fault Schulz for trying.
If anything, it’s better than his long takes, which really will bite Tesfaye in the ass come time to vote for Razzies. While I went in expecting to be proven wrong about the film’s quality, I ultimately came to embrace the audience’s bafflement. Schultz is a filmmaker who loves to insert 360° camera shots and close-ups of actors. In better stories, it’s an effective tool. When forced to watch The Weeknd express emotional shifts throughout, it becomes absurd. Even the way a shot lingers on the initial use of its titular song feels designed more as a Roy Andersson gag than something with emotional weight. Ironically, it’s not the worst example of “Hurry Up Tomorrow” based on early audience reaction. In fact, the other moment’s intention of catharsis is lost by that point.
This is all to say that Hurry Up Tomorrow, unfortunately, feels like a mangled hack job in ways that it shouldn’t. The album had all of the components necessary to tell a cohesive story. Instead, many cuts are reduced to orchestral tracks, with many of the biggest hits reduced to background noise or montages. There is fluidity lacking in a film celebrating The Weeknd’s music. Where his words should’ve been able to convey the depths of his complex thoughts, it’s abandoned at times in favor of a surrealist ode to better films that The Weeknd clearly admires. The film presents Jenna Ortega’s Anima as reminiscent of Annie Wilkes or Patrick Bateman in ways that never fully land.
This embodies The Cult of The Weeknd™ in ways that casual audiences will find masturbatory. Those unfamiliar with the broad strokes of “The Divine Comedy” may be especially lost on the metaphorical use of Barry Keoghan and Ortega as the story progresses (not that it makes sense to begin with). The efforts to picture the tortured artist ascending to his own artistic hell and heaven are intriguing ideas, but it’s never allowed to be more than detours in a plot that's constantly distracted.
Which is a shame because there is one way that this movie wins me over. As controversial as it sounds, I feel for Tesfaye as an artist. He has a platform to tell any story he wants and knows it’ll at least get proper distribution. To continue his transparency, he has created a character who is irredeemable. In theory, it’s what drew many to his music in the first place. As an ode to the self, it’s masturbatory, but one that’s asking age-old questions about identity within the fake personas we build. Is there a real person underneath The Weeknd and, more importantly, is there any way for him to resonate with general audiences? It’s a tale of imposter syndrome made worse by the fact that Tesfaye might not have the acting chops to sell the moral grey area between scumbag and redemption.
Also, Hurry Up Tomorrow deserves some credit as being the most go-for-broke artistic exploration of borderline personality disorder that a major studio has released. I do worry that harsh reviews will cause an overwhelming backlash from Tesfaye solely because it feels like an exploration of mental illness. Even the opening frame, in its own absurdism, feels part of his routine. Exploring the film with BPD in mind suddenly makes sense. It’s the fear of abandonment, the favorite person, the self-harm, the constant feelings of loneliness, the self-doubt that nobody has or ever loved you.
The issue with Hurry Up Tomorrow is that I love it conceptually. Here is a character so antithetical to good taste and explores our complex relationships to ourselves. It just so happens that he’s a cinephile who clearly has too many passions fighting for screen time. Despite the astounding cinematography Schultz provides, there is an imbalance with the melodrama. The songs on the album tell a complete story, including ones that warrant a potential backstory (for example, “Red Terror” discusses his complicated relationship with his mother, but is reduced to something much more trivial in the film). This could’ve been so much more than a trivial love story between two mentally ill people reenacting Dante’s ascension into the afterlife with Beatrice in “Paradiso.” In fact, the efforts to over-explain the ending makes one wonder… is this a story of crazy stalkers, lost loves, or just human-shaped vessels to remind The Weeknd that he made some bitching music over the past five years? The answer may be a little of each but, unfortunately, it’s not deft enough to feel like a grand cosmic theory.
Any efforts to defend the story are sidetracked by the reality that its biggest task was to put a bow on The Weeknd entirely. The trilogy marks an enviable achievement of creativity that pushes mainstream tastes into grandiosity, where stadiums are as much a place to rave as it is to bare one’s soul. Given how the album and film were most likely made in tandem, it’s strange how lacking in congruence they are. As a greater statement about his career, it's bogged down in meaningless genre tropes and iconography that could mean something, if only Tesfaye or Schultz put more pathos into the middle. This is the story of a damaged man who needs a hug. He gets it, but in the clumsiest way possible.
Even if this is bound for cult classic status, it’s disappointing because of what it’s not. It fails the album it shares a name with. It fails to cement The Weeknd’s legacy in a coherent cinematic message. What it says about him as an artist feels strangely lacking in ambition within a craft that’s overtly so. At most, it’s a playground-type deal that has the ideas but not the perspicacity. Again, this is all a shame because the materials we’ve been hearing for months now had great ideas that would only enhance this blend of sinister drama and musical confrontations. It’s the real identity that’s made The Weeknd great for years now. Why lose it during your conclusion?
Much like The Idol, there’s zero chance that Hurry Up Tomorrow is forgotten easily. There’s a good chance that it’ll only add to the social punching bag. With that said, I was eager to see it in theaters and experience with an audience. Maybe they too were The Weeknd fans desperate for the low Rotten Tomatoes score to be wrong. And yet, as the long takes piled up and the direction started to waver, the laughter entered. It’s not quite to the level of camp that some have made it out to be, but Hurry Up Tomorrow is such an ode to one person’s struggle with mental illness that it's somewhat admirable. I find somewhere in the fantasy that Tesfaye created for himself is a quest for expressing art’s ability to console. The issue is, of course, that a man who pushes people away isn’t necessarily the most accessible figure in the world no matter how many warts he wishes to show. That can be said for including a greater backstory that would've make The Cult of The Weeknd™ feel like more than a matinee antihero.
I don’t fault anyone who chooses to call this insufferable. For as much as I was caught up in the unpredictable flow, I recognize part of the reason I cared was because of the parasocial nature. There were metatextual elements I was bringing to the table that otherwise could be read as homeworkian. This isn’t a film one simply throws on and expects to appreciate. It’s beguiling with intent, of which it significantly fails. Even then, I wanted to believe that The Weeknd took some acting classes since The Idol. I wanted to believe Schultz’s direction would be enough to create a digital age tribute to one of pop’s darkest poets. Instead, it shows the limits. Many are likely to read my “positive” take and attack me for a host of reasons. I just don’t think this is a complete disaster, or at least one made cynically. It had the Herculean task of answering the question “Who is The Weeknd?” and finding out that the answer was more artificial than anybody had let on. It’s not profound by any stretch, but I can’t help but shake the sense that I’ll be indulging in the bizarre banality a few more times once it hits streaming.
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