I cannot stop thinking about The Weeknd’s mega-flop Hurry Up Tomorrow
There’s something bold in this unnecessarily long and creatively clammed-up film.
The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow has been dubbed one of the worst cinema release of 2025 so far. Liam Maguren, who saw it opening day, thinks it’s a lot stranger than that.
I’ve had a great run at the cinema these past couple of weeks. Final Destination: Bloodlines was a bloody fun time, Small Things Like These delivered affecting inner turmoil, The Salt Path peppered my heart, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning gifted some of the best action scenes I’m likely to see this year.
And yet, out of all the big-screen experiences I’ve had recently, the film that’s remained stuck in my head like a tapeworm is The Weeknd’s—AKA Abel Tesfaye’s—crowd-displeasing critical miss Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Coinciding with the release of his album of the same name, the film plays “like an extended music video,” Slant slammed, “with a thinly sketched plot painted in broad and illusory strokes.” The Hollywood Reporter were less kind to Tesfaye: “After this and HBO’s short-lived The Idol, some career counseling might be in order.” The most brutal critic of all is, of course, the internet, who collectively dunked on this one scene of Tesfaye’s acting.
Admittedly, I was genuinely excited for the film’s release. Not because of The Weeknd (I don’t know the guy, his music, or why his name’s missing an ‘e’) but because of the director Trey Edward Shults, whose made three vastly different films—Krisha, It Comes at Night & Waves—threaded with stylistic flair. Throw in Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, a trippy poster with literal teeth, and a trailer that promises some kind of wild existential nightmare, and maybe you can understand why I got giddy for this.
And there are things to praise. Shults creates luminous liminal spaces with his arsenal of whizzing camerawork, sonorous sound design, and eclectic editing decisions. Anyone entering the theatre with a six-pack of lager hoping for a Neil Breen disasterpiece will be severely disappointed at this film’s technical competency.
Ortega and Keoghan also manage to do a lot with very little as Crazed Super Fan and Doped-Up Fuck Boi, respectively. Their acting abilities, however, often highlight Tesfaye’s acting inability. I guy’s not even that bad (the aforementioned video not withstanding), but if I did shirtless flexes next to Dave Bautista, I’d look like a malnourished spider monkey by comparison.
The acting imbalances are just a symptom of a larger contrast that makes this film so mind-achingly bizarre. All this talent, spectacle, production, and bravado props up an extremely basic message about the fakeness of fame vs creative honesty. Every now and then, the film flirts with going wild, whether it’s a psychedelic clubbing scene, a nightmare sequence, or a crying Ortega dousing Tesfaye with petrol. The biggest tragedy, in my eyes, is how it never once lets loose, starving itself of all ambition.
Around this time last year, I got completely sucked into Jennifer Lopez’s This is Me… Now: A Love Story—a film that embraces every insane idea of hers and catapults them into the galaxy. This includes a massive mechanical heart close to explosion, a dance sequence with two performers bungee-tied together, and Ben Affleck breaking the news that, “Love Is Dead!”
This Is Me...Now: A Love Story
Is it silly? Yes. Is she being serious? Also yes. But unlike Hurry Up Tomorrow, which frustratingly refuses to heat its strange ideas beyond tepid, This is Me… Now carpet bombs the screen with humungous and unashamedly campy depictions of romance, heartbreak, and self-fulfilment. It’s as sincere as Les Misérables, with the gusto of the EuroVision Song Contest.
All this is to say: Hurry Up Tomorrow aims too low, when it should have aimed J-Lo.
This is Me… Now also wisely kept its running time to an hour and avoided a wide cinema release. The Weeknd put up much higher expectations. If Hurry Up Tomorrow wasn’t going to burst the floodgates as a truly crazy visual and audible experience that justified a big-screen outing, it at least needed to warrant its nearly two-hour runtime with a sustainable story, which it doesn’t.
Album films can do both. Kid Cudi proved this a couple of years back with Entergalactic, an animated odyssey about two young Black artists who navigate their creative ambitions with romantic entanglements. This visually seductive love-letter to New York City occasionally veered off into flights of fancy, but remained anchored by a very grounded and modern love story.
The film made time to give the audience a strong sense of its two lovebirds (voiced by Kid Cudi and Jessica Williams), their personal drives, the situation that pushes them together, and the small wedges that threaten to split them. Even the side characters get their time in the sun, especially Ty Dolla $ign’s Ky, who gets a whole different art style dedicated to his telling of an insane (and very funny) story.
Ortega and Keoghan simply don’t compare in Hurry Up Tomorrow. Part of me thinks it’s intentional, as if the pair are meant to represent two warring sides of Tesfaye’s psyche. That would be a generous read, though; the suggestion of such a cognitive dissonance could only really work for a film that dedicates itself to psychological horror. But it doesn’t dedicate. It only faintly commits.
This weirdly aligns with one of the only pertinent themes in the film: Tesfaye’s vapid connection with the women his life. We see him spitting wads of toxic over the phone with a faceless ex (voiced by Riley Keough) who he has some vague but deep history with. Later, as seen in that viral clip, he’s trying to brush off Ortega’s character the morning after they spent the night together which, according to him at the time, was meaningful and profound.
In these moments, Tesfaye makes this version of himself look and sound like a pissy little wimp boy, which may or may not come from a real place. Ortega’s character later unspools the supposed genius behind the lyrics of Blinding Lights to a tied-up and frightened Tesfaye, who is in no position to agree or disagree. This blind gushing isn’t far off from Keoghan’s sycophant praising Tesfaye’s masterfulness before shoving another line of coke up their noses.
There’s something bold in all this. Something vulnerable and earnest about Tesfaye putting his name on a deeply unlikeable person, laced with a kind of self-hatred that may come when everyone else around you just wants to fawn over your talent/fame. I haven’t been able to shake this idea, mainly because I’m puzzled as to why it all comes out in the form of this unnecessarily long and creatively clammed-up film.
Hurry Up Tomorrow shouldn’t be shamed for promoting an album—album films exist largely to do that, and they can be good! I also wouldn’t write it off as a mere vanity project, given Tesfaye’s willingness to present himself as a real piece of shit. And even though his internal struggles aren’t novel for a mega-star to experience, it can be approached in a novel way.
The most aggravating thing about Hurry Up Tomorrow is how it discovers a novel way—an existential horror about a self-destructing popstar—only to just stand there and leave all the gems unmined. I cannot get that thought out of my head.
