Hurry Up Tomorrow, 2025.
Directed by Trey Edward Shults.
Starring Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, Paul L. Davis, Gabby Barrett, and Olga Safari.
SYNOPSIS:
An insomniac musician encounters a mysterious stranger, leading to a journey that challenges everything he knows about himself.
Hurry Up Tomorrow has a bizarre mixture of names in front of and behind the camera. It comes from director Trey Edward Shults, who has dabbled and succeeded at telling slow-burning horror stories while also proving to be skilled at drama, but is co-written alongside popular musician The Weeknd (and Reza Fahim), also in the lead role (credited as Abel Tesfaye), coming off of a critically and commercially eviscerated step into television with The Idol, a show I have not seen meaning I’m not bringing any of that discourse baggage to this review. Reliable performers such as Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan are also present.
Something has got to give, though. The result is a hilariously awful yet painfully tedious disaster that not even a dynamic visual filmmaker like Trey Edward Shults can salvage. Hell, he barely makes the damn movie watchable. To be clear, that’s not to say the narrative is coherent.
Playing a fictionalized version of himself (or maybe not, who the hell knows), Abel is advised against touring due to a damaged voicebox that is likely brought on by stress. He still puts on performances, albeit requiring some motivation from his manager and longtime friend Lee (Barry Keoghan), and generally comes across as uninterested in his fame. That’s mainly because he is obsessed with an ex-girlfriend whom he acknowledges he hurt, but she has left him and will no longer return his calls.
There is no way to sugarcoat this, but Abel Tesfaye’s performance is embarrassingly whiny, which isn’t helped by his dialogue that sounds straight from the mouth of a teenager. This is a man who leaves voicemails professing he loves someone while hurling profane insults at them in the same sentence, all while sounding on the verge of tears. Even when Abel is intended to be threatening, one can’t help but laugh at his delivery.
Meanwhile, Jenna Ortega’s Anima sets fire to a home before heading to The Weeknd’s next concert. She is a superfan who catches his eye in the crowd, causing him to develop a new, unhealthy fixation. They hit the town all night and retreat to a hotel, becoming intimate and spending the night together. Breakfast is at 4 PM for Abel, an insomniac to the point that the official synopsis for the film emphasizes it, even though that doesn’t factor into the narrative.
Here’s how glacially paced and meandering Hurry Up Tomorrow is: you would be justified in assuming I was describing the film’s setup. No, that’s almost the entire first hour. This film is buried underneath a lot of nothing, including full-length musical performances and Abel looking sad. As for Anima, the revealed details about her are inconsequential to the story, other than it’s what draws her to him.
From there, the situation resembles Stephen King’s Misery, as Anima forces Abel into a moral reckoning with his questionable behavior. This is partially accomplished by forcing him to listen to his songs while she gives her take on the real meaning of the lyrics and how broken they reveal him to be. However, it’s off-putting that throughout much of this, Abel is presented as a victim worthy of sympathy when he isn’t; the film fails at portraying him with the complexity to make that work, meaning if he recognizes his flaws and changes his ways, it’s irrelevant. Whether or not Hurry Up Tomorrow is trying to blur the lines between artist and character would be fascinating if it didn’t take an hour to get there and if everything else weren’t so hollow and empty.
Before the film begins, a The Weeknd music video promotes a new song and album, further showing that this isn’t much of a real movie. It’s a vanity project from a self-absorbed musician who continues to dig his hole. At one point, the film turns into surreal horror, with Abel temporarily going to a nightmare presented as if he had woken up in Silent Hill. That would likely be an infinitely more compelling movie.
From behind the camera and in front of it, everyone else is trying far more than Hurry Up Tomorrow deserves (Jenna Ortega is convincing as a mentally disturbed fan, and Barry Keoghan is an intense voice of reason that Abel needs to move on from his ex-partner). Abel Tesfaye/The Weeknd presumably thinks he is creating deep abstract art at the intersection of artist and fictional character, but really, all he has shown with this film is that his head is up his own ass seven days a week.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
