In Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd is saying goodbye. For years, the artist otherwise known as Abel Tesfaye has been grappling with the limits of his R&B persona who, after breaking out with sultry, surreal mixtapes in 2009, has become this generation’s closest approximation to Michael Jackson or Prince. He’s been producing nonstop music under his alias ever since, leaning on an obsessive work ethic, non-stop momentum, and a precarious cocktail of substances and alcohol to keep the wheel turning. But in 2022, halfway through his first stadium tour, Tesfaye lost his voice, triggering the kind of mental break that forces one to reevaluate their priorities.
Tesfaye’s latest artistic effort dramatizes this harrowing memory, and the existential crisis that followed, to the key of a psychological thriller. Co-written with Waves director Trey Edward Shults, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a companion piece to his album of the same name, released earlier this year — an album he claims will be the last body of work he produces under “the Weeknd.” The loss of his voice felt like a sign to give up his persona. “My body was telling me to sit down,” Tesfaye told The New York Times. “It was telling me, ‘you have nothing else to say.’”
It takes a big man to admit he might have finally burned through his cache of goodwill. If only that self-awareness could have imbued Hurry Up Tomorrow with a sense of urgency, or the unique point of view it needed to make this farewell tour worth it.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is simply a slog. The film revels in Tesfaye’s pop star-coded anguish, relying on a perpetually spinning camera, blindsiding strobe effects, and a gauntlet of substance abuse to simulate the kind of surreal fantasy we’ve seen in other, far better films. It can’t even truly be classified as a platform for his new album, as most of his songs are stripped down to their instrumental layers or shoved to the background in favor of those trippy visuals.
The music Tesfaye created to accompany the film does most of the heavy lifting in Act 1. The haunting synths of “Wake Me Up,” a two-hander between the Weeknd and the electronic duo Justice, inform our hero’s fracturing mental state as he warms up for his upcoming show. His voice is already hanging by a thread as he powers through his vocal exercises, lifts a few weights, and replays a voicemail from a heartbroken ex-girlfriend (Riley Keough) on the night she chose to leave him. The latter is the catalyst for what’s sure to be a catastrophic crash-out — but Abel is determined to hold it together, and his childhood best friend-turned-manager (Barry Keoghan) is determined to ply him with enough hard substances to keep him distracted and the tour on schedule.
The backstage turmoil here is just one half of the story; the other half follows Anima (Jenna Ortega), a doe-eyed drifter who might just be the Weeknd’s most sociopathic super-fan. Shults’ camera follows her through a run-down home in the middle of nowhere, slinging a can of gasoline across family photos and old clothes. After setting fire to the ranch, she picks her way across country, eventually landing in New York City on the night of Abel’s next show.
Tesfaye and Shults’ script doesn’t offer much substance for any of its main characters, but it’s not hard to deduce the symbolism under the surface. “Anima” is another name for the unconscious persona, or the feminine instincts submerged within a man’s psyche. That’s exactly the role Ortega is meant to play in Hurry Up Tomorrow, spliced with the kind of obsessive “stan” Tesfaye has likely been trained to avoid in real life. When Abel takes the stage, she’s right in the front row to witness his voice give out in the middle of his opening number. When he desperately scans the crowd for help, his eyes lock with hers — and naturally, when he flees into the bowels of the arena, she follows, and later escapes with him.
It’s here, in their unlikely connection, that Hurry Up Tomorrow finally gets to the meat of its story. Without giving too much away, it’s a little like Misery meets The Shining — Anima is determined to help Abel heal by confronting the demons of his past, and her efforts send him down a rabbit hole of suppressed trauma and horror-house scares. It’s easy to believe that there’s no worse place to be than inside Abel’s head: when Shults finally lets go and digs into something dark and primal, the film comes close to finding its own voice. But it always comes back around to things that only matter to Tesfaye — the idea of a legacy, of being understood by fans, of artistic failure.
Tesfaye has always been obsessive about his privacy, and in a way, that may be the thing that kneecaps his quasi-biography just as it finds its footing. Anima wants Abel to dig deep, to “be honest,” but all we get is a surface-level survey of his miscellaneous regrets. When he inevitably reclaims his voice, it hardly feels earned. Even the trippiness inherent to this genre loses its potency after a while: its visual thrills are ingeniously crafted, but Tesfaye and Shults waste too much time trying to build a story around those thrills that it fails to connect on any level.
If Tesfaye is truly bidding farewell to the persona that thrust him into the spotlight, this could have been a chance to show us who the Weeknd really is. Instead, it’s just a vanity project that keeps its audience at arms’ length.
