Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) review

Dir. Trey Edward Shults

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

It’s safe to say Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s acting career hasn’t gone as planned. The ceaseless hitmaker — who stands on his own in a crowded music scene dominated by those whose snippets go viral on TikTok and other artists you don’t know by name whose songs you sort of know — has had a rough start after headlining the worst-reviewed HBO show in the network’s long history. Now, he’s responsible for a nearly two-hour long visualizer that’s so vain and shrouded in mystery, it gives Carly Simon enough material for a sequel to her legendary song.

Trey Edward Shults’ Hurry Up Tomorrow is the companion film to The Weeknd’s new album of the same name, released back in January. It’s been reported that Shults began filming the movie before the 2023 premiere of the aforementioned HBO show The Idol, which explains why Tesfaye’s on-screen persona is still aloof and melodramatic. Had this production been commissioned after the critical lashing that show endured through its five episodes, I imagine his approach might’ve been different. Maybe not.

Right now, the person responsible for Tesfaye’s shortcomings as an actor is Tesfaye himself. For someone who has no problem commanding the stage and being the center of attention, he has an incredibly difficult time coming across as human and natural on camera. Tesfaye’s uneven and at times comically goofy performance in Hurry Up Tomorrow has many of the signs of someone who hasn’t yet found an identity as an actor. At this point in time, he’s a mix of overly reactive facial expressions, brazen emotional reactions, and frustrating aloofness.

So despite all the (mostly negative) buzz and social media hot-takes, what exactly is Hurry Up Tomorrow? It’s a strange dramatization that revolves around The Weeknd’s ill-fated 2022 show at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles where, early into the concert, he lost his voice and could no longer continue performing. He profusely apologized on stage, offered refunds, and promised to return to LA at a later date (easy to say, it’s not like he was in Branson or Des Moines). Clearly, the experience had a lasting effect on him, for not only does his new album have an interlude called “I Can’t Fucking Sing,” but the experience serves as the basis for the companion film.

Abel Tesfaye is in an awful way, however. The morning after his girlfriend (Riley Keough) breaks up with him via a brutal, caustic (and probably deserved) voicemail, he gathers himself just barely enough to give his roaring fans at a concert. His manager and close friend, Lee (Barry Keoghan), tries to boost his ego by offering encouraging words and cocaine, but Abel is absolutely inconsolable over this breakup, all while fighting vocal pain amidst an international tour. A doctor tells him that his symptoms are psychosomatic (all in his head), and he just needs rest.

The absolute worst case scenario happens when Abel loses his voice during the first song of the following night’s show. In frustration, he leaves the stadium and runs into Anima (Jenna Ortega), a young fan with whom he locked eyes during the crowd minutes before his voice quit. The two catch a ride and embark on a night of carefree exuberance (shockingly, no sex), hitting up various hotspots before the next morning, in Abel’s hotel, when he informs her that he must leave. Amina isn’t ready to let Abel go. She believes she can be the solution to the problems that are plaguing him.

Strange to say the least is Tesfaye’s preoccupation with his SoFi show that never was. Sure, the event made headlines in the days that followed, but an artist’s vocals giving out in the midst of a high-profile, international tour where he is required to be in several different cities any given week is hardly an infeasible occurrence. The ensuing dramatization of such an event, underscored by the bitter words of his ex whose breakup voicemail he continuously desires to play, feels like he’s overcompensating for something. What that something is winds up being about as opaque as this film gets down the stretch, when Jenna Ortega’s Amina tries to prove to him about how great of an artist he is by dancing to and deconstructing “Blinding Lights” and “Gasoline.”

Who would’ve thought these popular songs might indeed have a deeper meaning behind them than just being danceable poppy fun or an ode to the new wave sounds of Depeche Mode, respectively?

Hurry Up Tomorrow sinks like a stone when it tries to make an insistence to the viewer that the ideas in its head are contemplative, deep, or even original. Ortega, who has had an up-and-down stretch recently between Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Death of a Unicorn, actually does a lot of great work in trying to give her shortchanged, threadbare character a semblance of a personality. Her wide eyes and perennial brooding sulk are married perfectly with the prolifically despondent and coldly slick atmosphere that dominates the picture. Shults, who directed the underrated horror film It Comes at Night in 2017, employs a variety of strobe effects, soft lighting, saturated color schemes, and intense, hypnotic patterns that mirror that of a music video, which is probably what this thing should’ve ultimately been.

In the realm of vanity projects made by popular artists, Hurry Up Tomorrow entertains more than Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon, or more recently, Travi$ Scott’s Circus Maximus. It’s as beguiling as it is bewildering, for it’s a movie that isn’t really complicated, but ends up feeling impenetrable because Shults and Tesfaye throw a lot of imagery at the audience and loosely connect it with very facile themes that make you think, “it can’t be this simple, can it?” For an artist who seems a bit lost in his own head as of late, it probably, very likely is.

Starring: Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Metro Boomin, Belly, and Riley Keough. Directed by: Trey Edward Shults.