If I told you that Hurry Up Tomorrow, the latest onscreen vanity project co-written by and starring Abel Tesfaye, opens with the Canadian singer-songwriter-sometime-actor blowing raspberries at his own reflection in a dressing room mirror for a solid minute, would you believe me? As far as first images go, it's a pretty apt summation of the experience as a whole. Your reaction to it is a fairly solid indication of whether you’ll be onboard for what little Hurry Up Tomorrow has to offer, your thoughts on the music Tesfaye has made (and the public persona he’s cultivated) as The Weeknd notwithstanding.
Named after Tesfaye’s latest studio album and directed by It Comes at Night’s Trey Edward Shults, the navel-gazing and over-indulgent Hurry Up Tomorrow centers around a fictionalized account of the days preceding and following an incident in 2022, in which Tesfaye lost his voice while performing on stage in Los Angeles. It cuts back and forth between the “Can’t Feel My Face” singer (as himself) preparing for a series of performances with his entourage in tow – including Lee (Barry Keough), his manager and confidant – and Anima (Jenna Ortega), a mysterious woman who is drawn to Tesfaye, and whose name may or may not be an overt nod to the Jungian psychological concept of the same name.
It is, at the risk of sounding glib, the role Tesfaye was born to play: The Basquiat-haired Lothario of modern R&B and pop, whose brooding demeanor and crooning falsetto catapulted him from the depths of anonymity to the heights of mainstream superstardom. The register of the performance has shifted over time, but its baseline remains static, even as he drops the stage name and steps into Hurry Up Tomorrow’s big-screen spotlight. For an excruciating hour and 45 minutes, the wounded, misunderstood, self-destructive, sullen-hearted bad boy of Tesfaye’s multiple chart-toppers is front and center.
He cries; he whines; he dejectedly slumps on the floor while madly pouring his heart out to an answering machine, begging and pleading for recognition and reconciliation with an unnamed, unseen lover. If you’ve listened to a single album by the Weeknd – or hell, a single song – you get the gist. All the while, Lee hovers at the periphery like an impish, all-seeing Jiminy Cricket, gyrating wildly on the floor and doling out lines of cocaine like it's both on clearance and going out of style.
If there's a salvageable performance to be found here, it's Ortega’s. When we first meet Anima, she's choking back tears while frantically pouring a canister of gasoline throughout an abandoned house – which we soon enough realize is Tesfaye's childhood home – before fleeing the scene in a dilapidated Jeep. It’s easy to assume, then, that Ortega's character represents one of the many, many women Tesfaye has loved and left behind in his meteoric rise to the top, but looks can be deceiving. What at first appears to be a manic pixie fangirl slowly but surely reveals itself to be something far darker and complex. Unlike either Tesfaye or Keoghan’s characters, Anima has depth (if only barely more than a puddle) and dimension (if only no more than two).
The music, as you can likely guess, is made up almost entirely from tracks pulled from the Hurry Up Tomorrow album and earlier Tesfaye releases. There are a few notable exceptions: Frequent collaborator and Uncut Gems composer Daniel Lopatin teams up with Tesfaye once again to provide the score for Hurry Up Tomorrow, lacing the brooding visuals with the discordant ambient menace and mischievous experimentation that is the signature of his own long-running, pseudonymous project, Oneohtrix Point Never. I'd say this movie would've been a better album but… well, it's literally a movie based on an album.
Hurry Up Tomorrow gets the most conceptually interesting during its back half. In a series of dream-like vignettes, Shults obliquely references great works from the pantheon of cinematic madness: The Shining, Misery, Vanilla Sky, and American Psycho each get a nod. (He gets in on the snake-eating-its-own-tail act, too, throwing It Comes at Night – ominous recurring red door and all – into the mix.) Beyond these surface-level allusions, however, the film struggles and fails to assert its own identity. It’s an exquisite corpse of borrowed motifs and imagery resuscitated against its own will (and ours, too). It’s alive, if only barely.
Both the album Hurry Up Tomorrow and the film it inspired are positioned as Tesfaye's final bow as the Weeknd, signaling his transition from the moniker that first brought him fame into a more holistic artistic approach under his given name. Even still, its finale suggests that all his strenuous efforts to shut away the past and embrace the future will never truly eliminate this part of himself. I say, good riddance to bad rubbish.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/hurry-up-tomorrow-review-weeknd-abel-tesfaye-jenna-ortega-barry-keoghan