Trey Edward Shults' new film "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is part of a vast multimedia project that trip-hop chanteuse Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye has been constructing since January 2025, when he released a concept album of the same name. The film seems to sport a narrative that has had been extrapolated from the album by co-screenwriters Shults, Tesfaye, and Reza Fahim, although it clearly aims to be a dreamy, hallucinatory opera of sorts, telling its story through outsize emotional beats. And on the surface, there are certainly a lot of emotional outpourings. There are tears, screams, and nightmares. Stylistically, there even appears to be an attempt to peek into the Weeknd's beak inner darkness.
But all the dreamy electronica on the soundtrack can't cover the fact that "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is dull, mediocre, plodding nonsense. It's bad, guys. Really, really bad. The film doesn't so much capture the Weeknd's complex soul, as it does give a megaphone to a pitiful whiner. Tesfaye tries to set up his on-screen character as a troubled, suffering artist, lost in a (possibly self-inflicted) post-breakup malaise, but he never actually describes the circumstances of the breakup, or why his ex was so angry with him. Riley Keough, only seen in pictures and heard over the phone, plays he ex-girlfriend, and she is only credited as "Girl on Voicemail." Shults and Tesfaye haven't made a complex drama about relationships gone awry, but an abstract examination of adolescent self-pity. The girlfriend is an abstract figure who only exists to allow the main character to wallow in pathos. The same could be said of Anima (Jenna Ortega), a young woman whose eye he catches at a concert, and who may provide his emotional salvation.
And, yes, the character is named "Anima," which will make all students of Jung roll their eyes. And that's one of the more subtle pieces of symbolism in this self-indulgent mess.