Cinematic Releases: Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Lionsgate

In September of 2022, during powerful and seemingly invincible singer and performer Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd’s After Hours til Dawn Tour show, one of the world’s top voices in current pop music cracked and broke on the global stage.  Like Icarus flying too high to the sun, it marked a dramatic point in the artist’s creative career as his ongoing attempts to transcend what had been done before in theater set pieces clipped his wings sending him crashing back down to Earth with the rest of us.  

It didn’t help that the singer was halfway into his next album Hurry Up Tomorrow when the incident occurred, forcing him back to the drawing board rethinking not only the album but the fate of The Weeknd brand as well hinting at a possible retirement of the character altogether.  Somewhere along the way, not wholly unlike the infamous Roger Waters meltdown that prompted Pink Floyd’s album and cinematic counterpart The Wall, it was decided The Weeknd’s next project would be a similarly multimedia experience with the album coming out first followed by a film version of such later.
 
Enter A24 stalwart and Krisha, It Comes at Night and Waves director Trey Edward Shults whose own approach to filmmaking has been experimental and sensory altering at best, employing fluctuating aspect ratios that drift in and out of 1.33:1 fullscreen, 1.85:1 widescreen and eventually 2.35:1 scope proportions.  Maybe the only director who does this in all of his films, Shults found himself hand picked by Abel Tesfaye as his primary choice of director with the intention of granting him creative freedom while still ultimately being an extension of The Weeknd’s latest (and perhaps final) album.  

The director’s first film shot on 35mm Kodak film in a project that also alternates between 16mm and even 8mm at times lensed by Blonde cinematographer Chayse Irvin, the independent production co-starring Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough came together around 2023 but sat in post-production for nearly two years trying to find a buyer.  Lionsgate which also picked up the domestic theatrical release of Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive Megalopolis ultimately bought the film which opens in theaters tomorrow though fans of The Weeknd (myself included) got an early peek at what is sure to be one of the year’s strangest music video curiosities in the Dolby Cinema.
 
Playing another alter-ego of himself, Abel Tesfaye is nearing a nervous breakdown fighting his way through show after show with his druggie manager Lee (Barry Keoghan) while fending off angry phone calls from a nameless girl (voiced by Riley Keough) whose heart he must’ve broken like so many other groupies before her.  In between partying and drinking, the film cuts back to a disturbed young fan named Anima (Jenna Ortega) in the midst of burning her house down, a sly reference to the track Gasoline from Dawn F.M.  Amid siphoning gasoline from other customers at a gas station, Anima gradually makes her way to The Weeknd’s next prospective concert.  

Doctors looking down Abel’s throat (in a scene reminiscent of his previous film Uncut Gems with its opening vista of a colonoscopy) tell him to take a break from singing for a bit to rest his vocal chords.  But with an insistent Lee breathing down his neck, through blood sweat and tears he proceeds with a Halloween themed show resulting in the infamous public breakdown of his voice.  Sneaking off the stage set, he runs into Anima and the duo decide to have a carefree evening at Santa Monica Pier donning masks to hide his fame.  While the two seem to have fun and closeness together, it is alas time for The Weeknd to resume touring and leave the area as well as her behind, a move which doesn’t sit well with her and prompts the film on a surreal psychological journey inward with overtones of Lynchian, Noe and Tarkovskian influenced imagery and long dialogue-free passages of experimentalism.

 
Bordering on being another pretentious music-video oriented vanity project, Trey Edward Shults’ and Abel Tesfaye’s companion piece to The Weeknd’s new album Hurry Up Tomorrow is a hyperkinetic sensory freakout that’s a bit wanting in the writing department and in the acting strengths of its central protagonist.  In a moment that feels like trolling the fans or putting them uncomfortably off guard, Tesfaye prior to a concert warms up by blowing vocals through his closed lips creating a brr-like sound and while the theater was packed with devoted fans donning their After Hours T-shirts it did engender some laughter.  

Edited by Shults himself, utilizing his aforementioned multiple aspect ratios drifting in and out of scope and fullscreen in the same take, the film opens with a much-earned warning about strobing for those with photosensitivity or epilepsy.  Hitting the viewer harder than Oliver Stone or Brandon Cronenberg with their propensities for sensory excesses as well as blasting across the 8-channel Dolby Atmos soundstage, it is perhaps the ultimate music video The Weeknd has been working towards his whole career.

 
That said, the dialogue is clunky if not stunted at times with Abel Tesfaye’s leaky eyes and somber gaze and singing voice standing in for his acting abilities.  He’s not bad but he could do a few more film roles unconnected to The Weeknd moniker to get a better grasp of his range.  Jenna Ortega plays a sociopath once again in a role that seems typecast for her though one has to wonder what the film might’ve been like with Rachel Zegler in it instead (thank God that didn’t happen).  Barry Keoghan, the great Irish actor from The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Saltburn, is on autopilot here as The Weeknd’s junkie manager whose fulltime job seems to consist of talking his client out of the tree.  

It is worth noting the film, behind-the-scenes, was the subject of controversy between the late producer Kevin Turen and Sam Levinson who previously produced The Idol starring Tesfaye.  Supposedly Turen proceeded without notifying Levinson resulting in the dissolution of their relationship.  Tragically a year and a half before the film finally found theatrical distribution, Turen passed away from a heart attack and the film is dedicated to him in the end credits.

 
A lot of Hurry Up Tomorrow depends on your own built-in fandom of The Weeknd from his music, his image and above all himself and Trey Edward Shults took something of a big risk in doing this film with Abel Tesfaye, a deconstructive experimental as well as indulgent student-film.  Equal parts a continuation of the music videos and concert films from before while also channeling in overt influences from Stalker, Enter the Void and even a little bit of Fear X with its elevator scenes, the film asks a lot of the viewer while also not serving up a ton contextually.  

While clearly a bit of a reconciliation with the Hell of his creating, Abel Tesfaye’s film is very plainly not going to be for everyone.  For the uninitiated, it is aggressively weird while also arguably paper thin as a nebulous narrative.  But for fans it is kind of The Weeknd’s Purple Rain, a film that plays up to the prowess of the stage persona as well as the fragility of the soul behind the costume. 

--Andrew Kotwicki