Hurry Up Tomorrow is a 2025 film directed by Trey Edwards Schults and written by The Weeknd, Trey and Reza Fahim, it follows the character of The Weeknd, Abel Tesfaye after he loses his voice on stage and gets inescapably intertwined with Anima(played by Jenna Ortega), a mysterious girl who affects his life greatly.

I’d looked forward to getting to watch this film on the big screen ever since it was announced, I’d been a huge The Weeknd fan for over a decade and the album, Hurry Up Tomorrow had been championed as his final hurrah, his last project before dropping the name, a career that had changed Pop and RnB in so many ways was coming to an end. When the film got released, I was on websites of the local cinemas in my vicinity, praying to God that at least one of them would be showing the film, but none did, I was broken, I’d have to wait until it was released on digital, thankfully the wait wasn’t long, it came out on Amazon Prime not long after and before anything, my laptop was on and I got to watch it.

Now before I go into my thoughts on the film, I’d like to first talk about the album itself. Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd’s last album as The Weeknd, is the last album of his trilogy which had been preceded by his acclaimed 2020 album, After Hours and 2022’s Dawn FM, projects where we saw him come to cinematically kill his Weeknd persona, a trilogy that sculpted itself after Dante’s Divine Comedy, After Hours being death, Dawn FM being purgatory and Hurry Up Tomorrow representing his rebirth. He’d started his career with a trilogy and ended it with one, with his 2020s run showing how much he’d grown and mastered scale and execution, he was doing stadium shows now, he was constantly breaking records with him music, his philanthropy knew no bounds, his music matured, he could go another decade if he wanted to, but after losing his voice while performing at the SoFi Stadium in 2022, he knew it was time to stop, he was retiring.

His career had seen him take on playing characters for his albums, the tourist in Kiss Land, victim of the Hollywood underworld in Beauty Behind The Madness, Popstar starboy in Starboy, but at the turn of the decade, in what feels now like was the premonition to an end, his new trilogy would see him embody characters that existed even outside of the music videos, breaking the fourth wall, performing at award shows and other live performances, he went full method actor. With After Hours came the Red Suit Man, with his bruised face getting worse and worse as the rollout progressed in his endless nightmare, his head even being fully bandaged at some point, and then Dawn FM saw him take on the Old Man Weeknd face, a figure constantly haunted by his own past as he’s forced to confront it wearing an aged look of pain, the After Hours Till Dawn tour would see him don an array of stylistic masks for his performances, but for Hurry Up Tomorrow, he stripped down his look to something more intimate, a hooded robe inspired by his Ethiopian heritage, a full realization of himself, his rebirth into truth.

The album, his longest to date, boasts of 22 tracks, with features from frequent collaborators Travis Scott, Future and Lana Del Rey, as well as Anitta and Playboi Carti, with production primarily helmed by Mike Dean, Oneohtrix Point Never and Metro Boomin, an appearance from Justice and a legacy feature with icon, Giorgio Moroder. The album swings from futurist to soulful, spiritual, pop ballads and funky records, he sings about his mother, about the tour life, about love and loss, about heaven, about finding God, about death and life and everything in-between, he sings to his inner child, he sings to who he used to be, he sings to who he’s becoming, he sings like he’s never sang before, he opens himself to his audience, his family, the people who have been with him since the beginning of his career, this is his farewell to them, and he hates that he’s leaving, even if he must.

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The film, which many would misinterpret as a companion piece to the album, actually came before it, after he lost his voice, an experience he’d call the scariest moment of his career, he and director, Trey Edwards Schults, who had directed indies It Comes At Night and Waves for A24, would start talking about a film that would function as his farewell to his The Weeknd persona, and it was when work on the film started that he begun to put songs together for an album. This is not a visual album, it is not a feature length music video, it functions as a standalone piece of the story, although it becomes more whole when put side by side with the album, it can exist on its own. I’ll try to talk about the film in bits, taking elements which drew me in.

Firstly, the story, the film is in many ways, an adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery, the book which followed a writer get rescued by his biggest fan in what would turn out to be a hostage situation horror, in the case of this film, the writer is a popstar and he is The Weeknd, the biggest fan is Anima, whose character acts as  a Jungian representation of a part of his psyche, his persona, a fairytale night with her is quickly turned on its head the next day as he wakes up to find himself tied up and forced to confront the pain of his career. The film’s logic is surreal, disjointed, leaving much of the plot to the viewer, who may or may not be aware they’re supposed to fill in the blanks, Anima’s motivations are unclear, even if it comes from a place of reflection, a place of inquisition, she’s supposed to act as an extension of the audience as an extension of The Weeknd, intriguing as it may, sometimes it presents itself as vague, unclear, I’m quick to romanticize it.

My favorite aspect of the film, as a geek, was the cinematography, which would see cinephiles Trey and Abel and cinematographer Chayse Irvin, draw from a series of references to make the film as stunning as possible, The Shining, Gaspar Noe’s films, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a shot I’m certain was pulled straight out of the Bong Joon Ho segment of Tokyo, Possession. The visuals are kaleidoscopic, pulling us into Abel’s psychedelic state of mind, his dreams are shot like one would imagine one, car scenes are constantly revolving, simultaneously claustrophobic and spacious, the drugs scenes mirror the substances, coke makes a scene fast and sharp, lean makes him mellow, the camera drags as he evaporates. With aspect ratio changes and the stretch of stylistic choices, one quickly understands why this is referred to as an experimental arthouse flick, the visuals assist the story in making it hard for the viewer to discern what’s real and what isn’t.

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The film’s score was done by Daniel Lopatin(Oneohtrix Point Never) avant garde musician who has scored films by The Safdies and who has also done production for The Weeknd on his previous albums, it is eerie and dissociative, cerebral as it seeps out of the screen into the ears of whoever is watching, making them unsettled and tense, no moment of comfort, it could all go wrong at any time. When music from the album is used in the film, it is harnessed as a plot driver, it just goes to show how much the music associates itself with the film in context, it isn’t a soundtrack but God, it would work perfect as one.

Naturally, many people’s problems with the film came down to Abel’s acting, which was quickly labeled as unconvincing and one-dimensional, especially after the backlash he received from 2023’s The Idol, I’d like to say I personally had no problems with his acting in this, but then again, I’m biased, but then again, he’s no Daniel Day Lewis. Of course, if my optimism is placed right, then Abel will be looking to replace his music career with filmmaking, as he’s been an outspoken cinephile as long as anybody’s known, but judging from the public’s reception to seeing him onscreen for anything longer than a music video or an interview, hopefully he becomes more concerned with the behind the scenes of writing and directing and less of acting, but again, I compare him to some of the biggest popstars who had acting stints, Prince, Elvis, Bowie, his idols and people whose acting segues are now celebrated as cult.

The film ends with him being baptized by fire and although unstated, The Weeknd is dead and only Abel Tesfaye remains, a career full of nods to him killing himself has seen him kill himself one last time, the performer we’ve been with since House Of Balloons, the man who revolutionized Pop and RnB with his alternative sensibilities, his lyrics on drugs and sex and melancholy, his cinematic eye, his personas, his antisocial response to global stardom, his public relationships and breakups, everything has come to an end now, and it’s a tearjerker. The film starts with a shot of him looking at us and ends the same, he’s been watched by us his entire career, now he’s gazing at us, the credits roll, we ask ourselves, “what’s next for him now?”

He asks himself“What’s next for me now?”

That’s all anybody wants to know, hurry up tomorrow.

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