Hurry Up Tomorrow Review: An Empty Look at The Weeknd

Hurry Up Tomorrow is much more concerned with feeling and sounding important than giving you a reason to truly care about what you’re watching.

But instead, it’s exactly what a lot of people would probably guess it to be, if they even had an idea in the first place.

Hurry Up Tomorrow, very loosely based on the eponymous album, is about a fictionalized, self-portrayed version of The Weeknd himself, Abel Tesfaye. Tesfaye is reeling after being left by his girlfriend due to his problematic behavior. While he continues succumbing to drugs, stress, and the loss of his voice (something that actually happened to him), he encounters a mysterious fan named Anima (Ortega), who slowly forces him to confront his past sins and toxicity. Keoghan is also present with somewhat limited screen time as Tesfaye’s manipulative manager.

The most popular terms to throw around a film like this include “vanity project” and “ego trip” with respect to The Weeknd. I genuinely tried to go in not assuming any self-absorbed attitude was being applied here, but those efforts were dashed within the first ten minutes when we’re treated to an entire performance of one of Tesfaye’s songs. It’s not very interesting to look at, and there’s nothing about his character to glean from it. You’re just… watching The Weeknd sing an entire song. Towards the end, Anima dances to two more of his songs while analyzing their meaning in front of him, which takes far more time than what’s needed.

But that ego-stroking doesn’t bother me too much and really isn’t as consistently prevalent as you’d think. What does bother me is the broader issue they display: the film’s pacing. Hurry Up Tomorrow, very ironically given its title, is a needlessly drawn-out movie that’s much more concerned with feeling and sounding important than giving you a reason to truly care about the experience. So many slow scenes would work perfectly well if there were resonant stakes applied to them, but the movie never at any point goes deeper than telling us that The Weeknd is a troubled, addicted, toxic rock star who’s afraid of his own loneliness. In other words, this is every single rock/pop star biopic story you’ve ever seen. 

Except unlike a film such as Better Man, which also has this tired arc, we’re told more about The Weeknd’s troubles than we’re actually shown them. This comes across like a very watered-down version of him, which is a common symptom of movies about real people that don’t want to portray them too negatively. It’s not like Tesfaye’s performance brings anything to the table. He doesn’t actively hurt the movie, but he also doesn’t rise above his bare-bones material, which is especially noticeable when Ortega’s performance laps his three times over. Outside of some directorial flourishes, she is the only thing that almost tricks me into thinking what I’m seeing is anything special.

All of this is to say: Even if you swapped out The Weeknd with a completely fictional singer and kept everything else the same, Hurry Up Tomorrow would still be a shallow, overblown, yet oddly safe movie that believes it’s way more important than it actually is. But yes, everything is made distractingly worse by centering that safe movie so heavily around The Weeknd and his material. You’re thinking about the real Weeknd too much to buy this version as his own fully realized character, and yet the film isn’t sincere or emotional enough to use that to its advantage and feel personal. It’s the worst of both worlds, which ruins whatever intentions Tesfaye had outside of promoting himself.

Shults is an amazing filmmaker, editor, and writer, but those talents only sometimes shine throughout Hurry Up Tomorrow. His touch provides just enough of a meditative, psychedelic flair to keep the film from being downright unwatchable, and Chayse Irvin’s cinematography compliments it well but isn’t quite a standout. There are also seeds of an interesting idea in what Anima ultimately reveals herself to be, what she manages to get out of Tesfaye, and the lasting impact she implicitly has on him. But they again revolve more around discussions about The Weeknd’s inner demons than actually letting us see and interpret them ourselves. 

Hurry Up Tomorrow treats itself as a bold, psychological deep dive into a popular entertainer. But the story, style, and messaging are desperately looking for an identity like The Weeknd scouring hallways in his Super Bowl show, and the audience is left with nowhere to go and nothing to take from it. Unless you count the appreciation of how much better his music is on its own compared to this. I can put up with a bit of ego, and I can even put up with style over substance. What I can’t tolerate, however, is when a movie that should be a slam dunk is this frustratingly empty.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is now available to watch globally in theaters.

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