‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ Review – The Weeknd’s Life Unravels In A Tedious Music Video Disguised As A Terrible Movie

Remember The Idol? Of course you don’t. Anyone who watched HBO’s second collaboration with Sam Levinson has rightly gone to extensive lengths in hopes of ensuring that the show’s existence has been scrubbed from their memories. The show, which followed a pop icon named Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) as she pursued the proverbial title of “America’s Sexiest Pop Star,” while her new collaborator, Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye), dramatically influenced the direction of her career and thus that of her idealistic celebrity life. It had raw star power – Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Troye Sivan, Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, and others were all mainstays in the cast – but its “plot” was a clogged, disastrous mechanism that said nothing new and seemed only to exist for the sake of jaws agape and furious social media reactions. It barely resembled a television series; it barely resembled anything at all.

If you do happen to remember something about The Idol, it’s probably the show’s willingness to step over the line with its depictions of sexuality and sex itself, especially when it came to Jocelyn’s newest single, “World Class Sinner,” a crappy tune that the rattailed Tedros felt needed some reworking. The remix he helps Jocelyn record made her feel freer than ever as an artist, yet left everyone on her team baffled, uncomfortable, and even a bit frightened. That’s because much of the song is sung in breathy tones, seemingly indicating that Jocelyn was having sex while recording it, and chock-full of moans, squeals, and well, sex noises. It’s a dreadful ditty, but one that fit perfectly inside the show: With all of its faults, The Idol succeeded in its primary goal of showing how fame, fortune, and father issues can drive even the biggest stars toward self-inflicted supernovae. There’s absolutely no doubt that both Levinson and Tesfaye, two of the three show’s co-creators, felt they’d caught lightning in a bottle, becoming masterminds of the melodramatic in real time. Of course, critics and audiences couldn’t disagree more, as the show was widely panned and ultimately cancelled before the first season’s body was cold.

In many ways, Tesfaye’s new project, Hurry Up Tomorrow, reminded me of that horrible tune, and not just because the artist still predominantly known as The Weeknd – though he’s toyed with dropping the stage name altogether – spends most of its runtime breathing quite heavily and all but moaning through the motions as it speedwalks its way toward nothing in particular. More so, the film (which shares its name with the singer’s newest album and runs a music video for the titular track before the movie actually starts) has more in common with Jocelyn’s reception of her new sound than anything else. The only thing that differentiates Levinson and Tesfaye’s creation and the latter’s perception of his own stardom – Hurry Up Tomorrow illustrates him as an insomniac whose music has a deeper, darker significance than even he is willing to acknowledge – is that Jocelyn is a fictional character, and thus easier to dismiss. Not much, on the other hand, separates The Weeknd and co-writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ brainchild from being an ad for an album that has been slow to gain traction on pop music charts that are being dominated by a new wave of artists. An ad for the album, which was released on Jan. 31, 2025, literally appears after the conclusion of the aforementioned music video and reads “OUT NOW,” as if the whole purpose of releasing a Lionsgate-backed thriller was to reach audiences that may not have had any idea that The Weeknd had some new-ish music to offer the world. 

That music is the soundtrack to Hurry Up Tomorrow, which makes it even harder to buy anything that this self-described “existential odyssey” is attempting to sell. Tesfaye plays himself in the film, an insomniac musician on the verge of a mental breakdown who drinks and performs and broods and performs and drinks some more. Much of the movie’s first act is spent watching The Weeknd as he stares into a dressing room mirror, contemplating the very idea that he has to go on stage in a matter of moments to share his gift with the world. And to be fair, Tesfaye is a remarkable performer; just look at the Super Bowl LV halftime show, which featured plenty of The Weeknd’s hits like “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights,” just months before that second song became the star of a Tik Tok trend at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in the years since 2016’s “Starboy,” the album on which “Blinding Lights” was the biggest banger, the star’s music has been less effective and thus less streamed. Blame the pandemic, or blame the artist’s “reinvention,” as critics have called the two albums that followed, or blame new faces. Whatever the case may be, The Idol is probably the biggest thing that The Weeknd has been a part of in close to a decade.

Perhaps that is a signature pillar in his own changing direction, the first effort in a potentially long line of moves that could see Tesfaye turning his pop stardom into a broader artistic career. But if his future endeavors are anything like Hurry Up Tomorrow, said career could be short and not all that sweet, as the film is, plainly put, a pompous, ludicrous, self-indulgent, ambling excuse for a movie that only seemed survivable due to the presence of Shults, and even his talents seem to have been washed away by the impulses and interests of his more powerful, famous collaborator. The auteur behind Krisha, It Comes At Night, and Waves has long been criticized for some of his narrative tendencies – heavy on brutality, light on the humanity he convinced audiences he was prioritizing – but there are elements in each of his three previous features that indicated real promise. Shults has made it known that he formerly served an apprenticeship under Terrence Malick, and qualities (like a distinct vision of how to portray colors on film, for one) have often been seen in his work. 

They’re nowhere to be found here. The colors that appear on screen are meaningless bursts of blue and red, as if to show the foggy essences of good and evil that are battling within The Weeknd’s psyche; the dialogue between characters tends to be reduced to screaming matches that end with someone, primarily Barry Keoghan’s Lee (playing Tesfaye’s manager), telling his damaged client that he’s one of one, a brilliant and untouchable talent whose dark thoughts don’t define him; and Shults’ now-signature move, a spinning camera in the backseat of a car, is used so frequently here that a motion sickness warning should have come before the film. If you don’t typically get sick from furious oscillation and flashing lights, you will, thanks to this barrage, a crash course in an interesting technique that is used to little effect, if not none at all.

It’s the kind of film that would tank the career of a burgeoning auteur who didn’t already have three audacious, ambitious features to his name, all before the age of 40. And it still might, given how poorly his body of work – namely 2019’s Waves – holds up on rewatches. But the problems here go far beyond pure filmmaking decisions. This is meant to be the tale of a singer whose life is thrown into chaos as he deals with that of an internal variety at the same time, yet what actually unfolds is nothing short of a lazy Misery riff with The Weeknd’s songs as its soundtrack. Hurry Up Tomorrow’s Annie Wilkes is played by Jenna Ortega, continuing the star of Netflix’s Wednesday’s lousy run of parts that sit in devastating contrast to the actor’s apparent cinephilic interests. She plays Anima, a tortured soul unto herself, a fan of The Weeknd who spends a lonely night with the singer, during which he feels seen by her and begs her to never leave him. When morning comes and he’s all too eager to head out, Anima feels betrayed, but not as though she was used as a prop in Abel’s healing journey. Her anger is derived from a place of being needed for greater discovery. She feels that her idol’s discography is more profound than the artist himself lets on, and itches to convince him to admit it. Given the Misery of it all, it’s only a matter of time before he’s tied to the bed, their hotel room is trashed, and a series of tunes are played through a speaker in an effort to get The Weeknd to be vulnerable again.

This is a movie that is so desperate to be a kaleidoscopic trip that it forgets the basics of storytelling, as if that was ever really its goal to begin with. What is more likely is that The Weeknd and Shults bought into its star’s self-mythology and felt it worthy of a feature film, one in which a pop star feels abandoned by his loved ones and misunderstood by everyone who remains in his orbit. Shults deserves some credit for being the anti-Levinson – that is, attempting to be a provocative storyteller as opposed to defining his filmmaking ideals by provocations themselves – but he’s similarly over-reliant on making cool-looking images that would fit far better in a music video, where a real plot is less of a non-negotiable, than in a real movie. In hindsight, it’s no wonder that Lionsgate was desperate to only show press the film at an advanced “fan event” screening put on by AMC Theatres, and that the film’s embargo was only lifted as soon as the first Thursday, May 15, showtimes were underway. 

That’s not enough to bury a film that feels so keen to bury itself in the process of its story unfolding, as there really isn’t much beyond the presence of Ortega and Keoghan to keep anyone with a pulse invested. Even those actors, gifted by all accounts, are blown off the screen by Tesfaye’s naked performance, but not in the way that up-and-coming actors tend to in their breakout roles. No, The Weeknd is simply terrible as himself, ironically, exhibiting no understanding of what it means to portray even a lightly fictionalized character. But that might have more to do with there being nothing to really play: Abel Tesfaye may be an extremely talented singer with demons, but that doesn’t mean he’s any good at embodying them on screen, nor that they were worth putting on screen for damn-near two hours. Kudos to him for getting a major movie studio to back his own vanity project, I guess, but as the lyrics of “Hurry Up Tomorrow” state, they’ll likely have to be the ones to pay for his sins in the end.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is currently playing in theaters courtesy of Lionsgate.