HURRY UP TOMORROW. A Narcissistic Promo Clip [REVIEW]

The Weeknd feels drawn to cinema. It was evident in The Idol, which was, in a way, a bizarre attempt at self-mythologizing by the musician. The HBO-produced series (probably still under its old/new name at the time) was incoherent and virtually unwatchable, but it generated a lot of buzz – and that was probably the point. The next film project from the Canadian superstar promised to be a bit more serious – Hurry Up Tomorrow premiered with less fanfare, and the promised dreamlike story about a star battling his inner demons sounded more ambitious than The Idol‘s parade of naked bodies and glitter. There was also a change in a key collaborator – instead of Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, a bit trapped in the cage of his own success, the director’s chair was taken by Trey Edward Shults, a respected figure in indie cinema and the mind behind Waves. Alongside The Weeknd and Reza Fahim (co-writer of The Idol), Shults has created… well, it’s hard to say exactly what.

We enter Hurry Up Tomorrow in a mysterious and intense way – a clearly emotional Weeknd steps onto a light-pulsing stage. Simultaneously, an anonymous female character played by Jenna Ortega sets fire to a house somewhere in the mountainous regions of the U.S. The opening sequence is something of a show-off moment for Shults, who once again spins the camera, interspersing close-ups with flashy pullbacks, all in a neon synergy of lights and music that evokes late-period Nicolas Winding Refn or Gaspar Noé.

However, after this spectacular opening, the actual narrative barely kicks in. Hurry Up Tomorrow continues in this mode, offering only scraps of dialogue and brief interactions between The Weeknd and his manager, which, due to lack of competition, end up serving as exposition. The film drifts along like this until the moment the protagonist meets Ortega’s character. When that happens, Shults finally breaks the film’s stagnant rhythm – and does so repeatedly – building the second half into a somewhat strange social drama (with echoes of the tearful tone of Waves) occasionally mingled with a thick, brooding atmosphere, reminding us that he also directed the fascinating neo-horror It Comes at Night.

If beneath this somewhat chaotic and decidedly cacophonous surface – aiming, besides Refn and Noé, clearly at David Lynch’s poetic style – there were any interesting messages, Hurry Up Tomorrow’s artistic gamble might have paid off. Unfortunately, everything the Shults/Weeknd/Fahim trio has to say boils down to: behind success lies suffering, and the artist is sad and emotionally messy. Who would’ve thought? No one’s ever said that before.

The Weeknd crosses the Rubicon of pretentiousness when, within a film that is already a garish low-budget analysis of an artist’s soul, he starts analyzing and interpreting his own songs (okay, for appearances’ sake, the words are put in Ortega’s mouth). With some goodwill, you might read this as irony, a postmodern parody. But after more than an hour of slogging through a film nearly devoid of real narrative tension, it’s hard to summon that kind of goodwill.

The whole thing feels less like a proper film and more like a music video blown up to feature length. If you condensed Hurry Up Tomorrow’s plot into 4–5 minutes and imagined it as a visual accompaniment to the song that plays at the beginning, you’d have a classic MTV production. Even the presence of Ortega and Barry Keoghan (as the somewhat toxic manager) feels like star casting for a big-budget music video.

Yet the shallowness of the themes Hurry Up Tomorrow “tackles” doesn’t even suit a chart-topping hit made for commercial success. Regardless of how you rate The Weeknd’s lyrics, he doesn’t do himself any favors with his evident need to publicly dissect their hidden meanings and depths in a project that’s hard to see as anything other than a very ambitious ad for his Spotify profile. Literally, too – the Hurry Up Tomorrow album is being released alongside the film, with its tracks featured in the soundtrack.

Hurry Up Tomorrow unintentionally reminded me of Robbie Williams’ Better Man. And although Shults’ film is theoretically more ambitious and formally polished, with all its impressionistic trappings, elaborate staging, and even a few genuinely successful audiovisual scenes, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the much-mocked Better Man project – both in the U.S. and on TikTok – was in every way more successful. Even as a piece of promotion. After watching Hurry Up Tomorrow, I was so exhausted by the stream of incoherence coming from The Weeknd that I didn’t feel like playing his album or even writing this review – unlike after Better Man, which made me pull up a playlist.

The only thing I truly felt after finishing Shults’ film was relief – that it was finally over.