Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ on VOD, The Weeknd’s Long, Dull, Navel-Gazing Ego-Trip Movie

By John Serba

Hurry Up Tomorrow (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is no Purple Rain. In fact, Under the Cherry Moon is a closer comparison, being a critically lambasted tunnel-vision ego trip of a movie from a musician who doesn’t seem entirely comfortable as the subject of a scrambled fact-meets-fiction feature film. Mega-pop-star Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, turns a few kernels of his own life into an oversized movie with Hurry Up Tomorrow, which functions as a companion piece to his recent album of the same title (and may mark the end of “The Weeknd” as a persona, per some of Tesfaye’s recent interviews). The music was considerably more well-received than the movie, which rustled up a sad $6 million at the box office, and not only collected a slate of deadly pans from critics – just like Tesfaye’s icky HBO series The Idol, notably – but inspired derisive laughter from audiences. So maybe as a regular movie-type movie it’s a failure, but what if we approach it as a glorified music video? Maybe that’ll do the trick?

HURRY UP TOMORROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Weeknd is getting his ass handed to him. Via voicemail. From an angry ex. Maybe he shouldn’t listen to it minutes before taking the stage in front of a football stadium full of people. Or maybe he should? Who knows what inspires a person to perform, right? Positive energy, negative energy. Now he sits in front of the camera in extreme closeup, psyching himself up. The camera barely pulls back from tight angles that play like intimate inspections of his pores. He motorboats his lips. He pumps a little iron. He hits his inhaler. He takes a pull from a beer bottle. He hops around like a prizefighter. His manager Lee (Barry Keoghan) and various handlers rush into the room and finish fluffing him. They drape him in a boxer-style robe and he walks out onto a cross-shaped platform stage lined with neon lights like it’s his and everyone in the room is in his thrall. Which is true. He sings “Wake Me Up” and everything out there is good.

Or not. We still hear the song as an unnamed woman (Jenna Ortega) douses the inside of a house with gasoline and lights a match. She sobs as she runs to her truck and takes off. Golly, I hope The Weeknd doesn’t meet this lady, right? Speaking of. He’s in a sprawling hotel suite. In one room, Lee and a variety of revelers live it up and never live it down. Pizza. Blow. Women. In the bedroom, the camera slowly glides past a naked sleeping woman in the bed to The Weeknd on the floor, legs splayed like a child, fiddling with a keyboard and quietly humming a melody. Glamor? Fame? Looks more like depression. Or misery, lowercase “m.” We’ll get to the uppercase version soon enough.

Unnamed Woman – OK, the credits call her “Anima” – ignores calls from her mother. We see over her shoulder to her phone, which boasts a notification: “The Weeknd tickets,” it reads. Uh oh. Meanwhile, The Weeknd sees a doctor. His vocal cords are fine but not wholly functional. “It’s psychological,” the doc says. The Weeknd needs rest. But you know what they say: no rest for The Wickd. Lee pumps him up: “You’re not a normal human! You’re a superhero!” Etc. The Weeknd takes the stage anyway and “Anima” pushes through the crowd and The Weeknd sings “Wake Me Up” and “Anima”’s eyes widen and The Weeknd’s voice goes POP and as he panics and tries to squeeze out the notes their eyes meet. Uh oh. Bottom line here? The Weeknd DOES NOT lip-sync live.

The Weeknd dashes off stage and through the bowels of the stadium as “Anima” does the same, dodging a security guard. They just about crash into each other, rom-com meet-cute style. They hang out at a carnival, wearing masks so he’s not recognized. They ride a rollercoaster. They go back to the hotel room and The Weeknd plays one of his songs on his phone and “Anima” cries. Of course she cries. She’s his biggest fan. Sometime in the wee hours when they’re in bed we hear The Weeknd whimper, “Don’t ever leave me.” Did he just say that? He just said that. Should have said that? He should not have said that. But he did.

Photo: Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hurry Up Tomorrow is capital-M Misery meets – well, since we already dropped Under the Cherry Moon, let’s go with Graffiti Bridge this time.

Performance Worth Watching: Well, The Weeknd is no actor, and Ortega, well, she might do well to consider a sequel to the remarkably tone-deaf Miller’s Girl before making another movie with him. That leaves Keoghan ripe for this accolade, and he earns it, sticking his face in a plate of cocaine and being generally memorable in a fairly small, not-bad-for-a-few-days-work role.

Memorable Dialogue: “Please be honest,” “Anima” insists to The Weeknd so frequently, we get the feeling that the movie might be about how he isn’t always honest.

Sex and Skin: Brief lady toplessness.

Photo: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

Our Take: Anyone hoping that Hurry Up Tomorrow illuminates where The Weeknd stops and Abel Tesfaye starts will be disappointed – the persona and the person are so often inextricably blurred, are they not? And he seems to be wrestling with this truth throughout this navel-gazer of a film, but getting absolutely nowhere. The implication of the story here – which plays out like seven minutes of plot crammed into 105 minutes of screen time – is that he needs a teardown and rebuild in the part of the Venn diagram where his art self and regular self overlap. And what better way to initiate that than with wheezing, ancient psycho-girl/disturbed-fan tropes playing out in the fallout of the greatest tragedy anyone could ever face, a – gasp! – canceled concert due to illness? This is what the tagline must be referring to when it says The Weeknd “unravels his very core existence”? Get the f— outta here.

To be fair, to each their own personal crisis. But your level of investment in this quasi-drama hinges solely on your fandom. As a The Weeknd agnostic, I tried to find something to relate to, an emotional hook, a snatch of Behind the Music drama, anything really, and came up empty. The glassy-eyed “Anima” parsing the lyrics of “Blinding Lights” and “Gasoline” just doesn’t cut it as inclusive cinema.

Hurry Up features a couple of fleeting moments where there’s a curious pull to the movie, like it’s on the cusp of making an emotional connection, as often happens when a profound piece of music matches up with a poetic visual. Key word being “fleeting,” as the bulk of the film is closeups of The Weeknd and occasionally of Ortega (one of her especially weepy ones inspires a big laugh, the opposite of what it’s going for), gussied up with self-reflexive artsy-fartsy moves by director Trey Edward Shults (whose Krisha and Waves were excellent in ways this movie absolutely is not), who shoots with grainy textures, farts around with aspect ratios and recreates the whirlwind activity of a big-time concert tour by repeatedly, well, whirling the camera around. 

The film plays out with one grossly tumescent scene after another, story beats hitting like the imperceptible thrum of continental drift. A dream sequence is as interminably dull as someone telling you all the banal details of last night’s dream, and I think “Anima” and The Weeknd were on that rollercoaster for two, maybe three weeks. I was left with the feeling that Hurry Up Tomorrow might work better as a high-concept concert film, as the moments Shults captures of The Weeknd performing live bristle with electricity, and are far more effective than dozens of extreme closeups notable for the blankness behind his eyes. There were moments when I wondered if being high might make the movie better, but no, probably not. Acquiring an all-access pass to this movie requires one to be in rapture to The Weeknd, just like The Weeknd seems to be.

Our Call: You thought it was passe, but the pop-star vanity project lives! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.