Hurry Up Tomorrow

by Mike McGranaghan

If you approach Hurry Up Tomorrow as a fan of singer The Weeknd, you might be disappointed. This is not a mainstream or commercial movie in any way. On the other hand, if you approach it as a fan of director Trey Edward Shults, you’ll discover that he’s followed up Krisha, It Comes at Night, and Waves with another extraordinary film. Shults is ahead of his time, as is his latest effort. Most people who see it now will probably hate it, but I believe that in 30 years it may well be considered one of the seminal motion pictures of the 2020s.

Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. The Weeknd) plays himself. We meet him at a low point in life. Audiences love him, but his girlfriend has just broken up with him. Not only that, she has flat out accused him of being a terrible human being. Faced with heartache and a stress-related condition that impacts his vocals, The Weeknd doesn’t want to do his show. Ride-or-die manager Lee (Barry Keoghan) convinces him to push through the anguish. While onstage, he forms a spontaneous connection with Anima (Jenna Ortega), a troubled young woman in the crowd. They spend the night together afterward. This encounter forces him to reevaluate who he is as a person, rather than as an artist.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is Purple Rain for the 21st century. Prince played a thinly veiled version of himself in that 1984 classic, which explored the personal pain that drove his music, usually letting the songs do most of the talking. Shults takes a similar approach here. Through his time with Anima, The Weeknd is forced to confront the feelings that he normally wraps up in the comfort of catchy, beat-driven songs. One of the best scenes has Anima making him listen to two of his own recordings, “Blinding Lights” and “Gasoline,” and consider what they really mean when stripped of their polish.

This pop star character, and presumably the man who plays him, has a fear of loneliness. Cheering fans, groupies, and hangers-on provide a substitute for actual connection. Anima has a similar issue; when we first see her, she’s literally burning away a painful portion of her life. To the extent that there’s a message, it’s that fearing loneliness can cause you to make desperate, selfish choices – ones that can negatively impact others who get innocently sucked into your neediness.

Shults always takes a very experimental approach to storytelling, and he does that again here. Dialogue is minimal at times. Sound and imagery fill in the gaps. Visually, the director employs changing aspect ratios, going wide when we’re seeing “The Weeknd” and narrowing in when Abel Tesfaye is having a significant personal moment. Also utilized are spinning cameras, strobe effects, colored filters, moody cinematography, and disorienting editing techniques. On a sonic level, you get the pleasure of hearing The Weeknd’s music combined with instrumental pieces that have evocative sounds mixed in. Hurry Up Tomorrow is truly a sensory experience that benefits from a big screen and a powerful sound system.

Performance-wise, Tesfaye does a great job of baring his soul. Some will certainly accuse the movie of being a vanity project, but he’s totally fine making his character occasionally unlikeable. Jenna Ortega has a difficult task, as she needs to hint at Anima’s broken nature without a lot of specific detail. She does that beautifully, simultaneously implying how deeply Anima is touched by The Weeknd’s music. Barry Keoghan adds a nice touch of show biz sleaziness as the cocaine-snorting manager.

I was gripped by every second of Hurry Up Tomorrow. Freeform plotting caused me to lean into it a little more, to think about what I was seeing and hearing. Trey Edward Shults takes genuine, thrilling risks with this picture. That alone separates it from the IP-driven fare that routinely fills multiplexes these days. This movie has lodged itself in my brain, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.

---