Hurry Up Tomorrow (dir. Trey Edward Shults)

by Jack Martin | May 17, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 105 mins

UK Distributor: Lionsgate

UK Release Date: 16 May 2025

WHO’S IN HURRY UP TOMORROW?

Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, Ash T, Paul L. Davis, Kiara Liz, Ivan Troy

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Trey Edward Shults (director, writer, editor), Abel Tesfaye (writer, producer, composer), Reza Fahim (writer, producer), Harrison Kreiss and Kevin Turen (producers), Daniel Lopatin (composer), Chayse Irvin (cinematographer)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A music superstar (Tesfaye) connects with an enigmatic fan (Ortega)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HURRY UP TOMORROW?

What do Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Vanilla Ice, and now Abel Tesfaye – better known as The Weeknd – all have in common? Aside from being well-remembered music icons, all of them have some point starred in exceptionally ego-stroking vanity projects, with no purpose or message other than to tell the world how amazing and important their central figures are.

But unlike Jackson’s Moonwalker, Carey’s Glitter, or even Ice’s Cool As Ice, all of which are in their own way the kind of musician vanity projects where you can point and laugh at the extravagant self-indulgence on display, Hurry Up Tomorrow – which Tesfaye also produces and co-writes with both Reza Fahim, the co-creator of the singer’s ill-fated TV series The Idol, and the film’s director Trey Edward Shults – is an ego trip so monstrous that it’s not even fun to watch.

Want to know how egomaniacal this film is? The film opens on an extreme close-up shot of one of the singer’s pupils, as Tesfaye (playing himself, of course) stares down the lens performing vocal exercises that make him sound like a babbling six-month-old, before being hyped up moments later by his friend and manager Lee (Barry Keoghan) as he prepares to take the stage in front of thousands of adoring fans. But as we quickly find out, despite his fame and wealth and hard-partying lifestyle, Tesfaye is actually quite sad, still reeling from what sounds like a pretty acrimonious break-up and on the verge of losing his voice from all that troublesome partying. Hope initially appears to shine through when Tesfaye encounters a young fan of his named Anima (Jenna Ortega), but their connection from how deeply troubled and misunderstood they are soon takes a sinister turn that forces the singer to take a good, long look at himself. Although, given what the movie is, that last part really isn’t that difficult for him.

What Hurry Up Tomorrow is, above everything, is a bloated advert for The Weeknd’s latest album of the same name, disguised as arthouse fare that thinks of itself as a warped journey of the soul in the spirit of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, but is in fact the kind of pretentious gobbledygook made by that really annoyingly smug kid in your film class who considers Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers to be the greatest movie of all time. Shults, a filmmaker with clear visual talent who has yet to find a major project that truly utilises his unusual aspect ratio-shifting vision, is here entirely at the mercy of his star and co-writer, who has clearly instructed the director to lean hard into the mystery of it all without ever making it clear as to what that mystery actually is, so long as it makes its lead look impeccable.

As a result, the movie is completely bereft of plot and character, with little to no sense of structure or thematic depth, its attempted explorations of mental illness and toxic co-dependency remaining irresponsibly surface-level, while there is non-existent chemistry between the actors who all behave like they’ve only met each other moments before cameras started rolling, and have thus been unable to establish any true connection with one another. It’s a film that barely feels like anything is really happening, and by the time things wrap up it doesn’t even seem like we’re halfway through, almost as if the viewer is being trolled by someone who doesn’t even know how to properly troll.

Tesfaye’s ego is in full control here, for it all revolves around his performative persona of the tortured artist who demands our immediate sympathy simply because he (unconvincingly) cries a lot when on camera. It doesn’t help that Tesfaye is, quite frankly, a pretty bad actor, something that was already apparent when he last stepped in front of a camera in The Idol, but here somehow turns in a much less interesting performance as a version of himself who only ever has one emotional mode and appears to physically struggle when trying to feel anything else.

Fellow performers Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan act circles around him, but even they are saddled with characters that barely have one trait to call their own and exist only to prop up their co-star and his admittedly strong line of musical work. Ortega, in particular, spends much of the film’s heavily Misery-inspired latter half dancing to some of Tesfaye/The Weeknd’s most notable tracks like “Blinding Lights” and analysing his lyrics like they’re a deceptively deep comment on the music video’s YouTube page, which once again goes to show the kind of ego we’re dealing with here.

On a slightly more positive note, the film is fairly well-shot, with cinematography that paves the way for some interesting camera movements like rotating 360 degrees in a moving car, as well as a couple of eerie moments set on an entirely deserted city street that recalls the Times Square sequence in Vanilla Sky. But even Shults, the visionary filmmaker he clearly fancies himself as (at least, when under The Weeknd’s tight grasp), still finds a way to make that initial visual intrigue almost incomprehensible, with flashy editing and bright strobing lights flickering through early scenes to, once again, disguise the fact that the overall movie is saying and doing absolutely nothing, with zero self-awareness to speak of.

If it had just been an exclusive album bonus you locate using a QR code on the vinyl sleeve, then Hurry Up Tomorrow would have at least avoided the embarrassment of projecting this artist’s megalomaniacal ego onto the big screen. But the fact that audiences everywhere have no choice but to sit in an empty auditorium and endure the most self-aggrandising vanity project since Michael Flatley cast himself as a Bond-like hero in Blackbird is somehow more extortionate than the retail price of that album, which you’re better off listening to than watching this needless visual companion.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Hurry Up Tomorrow is an obscenely self-indulgent musician vanity project that unlike previous examples isn’t even ironically fun to watch, for it sees Abel Tesfaye/The Weeknd put himself and his musical legacy front and centre of an empty narrative that relies on pretentious albeit well-shot visuals and his frankly terrible lead performance to provide fuel, only for it to go nowhere and say nothing interesting to justify holding the audience hostage to such a monstrous ego.