The phrase that floats to mind most relentlessly while watching HURRY UP TOMORROW is self-indulgent. The film, which follows a musician over the course of a fraught few days, lingers insistently on its star, Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd, a handsome man with a fine stage presence caught in a script he co-authored that seeks to cast a megastar singer with toxic tendencies as the victim of his life. And while it is certain that his character, also named The Weeknd, is the author of his own misery, it is also true that the actual victims he has left in his wake are more deserving of the audience’s empathy.
It begins with a voicemail to The Weeknd from the woman who is leaving him and describing why that is. The Weeknd is fighting back tears, as we see from the tight close-up of the iris of his right eye that gradually pulls out revealing him motorboating his lips, hitting his inhaler, and swigging something undoubtedly intoxicating and very expensive from a bottle. It is a very long take. Very long as he limbers up his lips and fights those tears and while it has its charms as a reveal about how this particular singer warms up for a performance, or anyone obsessed with The Weeknd’s admittedly kissable lips, its length has little value for anyone else. He’s about to go onstage to sing about the power of love after a pep talk from his manager and best friend, Lee (Barry Keoghan at particularly high intensity) that includes letting The Weeknd punch him in the stomach repeatedly, albeit while wearing a tummy guard of some sort.
Meanwhile, in the wintry middle of nowhere, Anima (Jenna Ortega) is also in tears, but ugly tears as opposed to the aesthetically graceful ones shed by The Weeknd. She is in obvious emotional distress, which explains why she is sprinkling gasoline over her home before setting it on fire and bugging out in her old pickup truck. And so, we are introduced to two desperate characters on the far ends of the economic ladder who will, eventually, collide with bombastic results. They will also be overweeningly symbolic results, hence Anima, and, yes, the Jungian overtones are deliberate as this semi-autobiographical exercise by and about The Weeknd plays out.
Visually, this is a satisfying film, with editing and effects decisions that offer a world of slightly heightened, even surreal, overtones. If it relies on close-ups to convey emotional vulnerability and intimacy, it intermittently knows how to make it seem necessary without being too self-conscious (I refer you back to the lip-limbering sequence that opens the film). The script, alas, is a muddle. It takes far too long for The Weeknd to face his Anima, and even as he is using her to mend his own broken heart before moving on, he is demanding that we feel sorry for him, not his incendiary pick-up. The symbolism of what follows, a manager who sees his client/best friend as his cash cow even as he works him to physical exhaustion; the innocence of a stolen evening at an amusement park and dive bar on Halloween with Anima; the metaphor of fire and female rage that is, ahem, dampened by The Weeknd’s ego, all conspire to create a jumble of standard tropes about the emptiness of fame before segueing into a pale evocation of Stephen King’s MISERY. All the while, the camera focuses itself on The Weeknd’s face as he grapples with his inner demons with tears that fall poetically from world-weary eyes.
This being The Weeknd, there is much music, and good music at that, even when Anima forces him to parse his discography after their one-night stand is revealed to her for what it is. There are also individual scenes of potent id-like energy, though badly undermined by non-sequiturs and more shots of The Weeknd being lonely amid the debauchery of his life and tormented by what his mother might think of him. We never see her, by the way, or get her perspective on any of this. Or find out exactly what he did to make the love of his life leave him, but I digress. The de rigeur shot of The Weeknd looking at his boyhood self is righteously artsy, but does it amplify or annotate anything? Nope.
HURRY UP TOMORROW sat on a shelf for a few years before finding a distributor, and there is no mystery as to why that is. It is, to coin a phrase, full of sound and fury signifying nothing aside from a chance for Ortega to show off her range as an angry, confused young woman and her not inconsiderable dancing skills. The flick may have a bright future as a midnight movie, perhaps as a double-bill with Tommy Wiseau’s THE ROOM. For reasons I can’t reveal without spoilers, Ortega and her gasoline can is a parody waiting to happen. In the meantime, we can surely look forward to a few nods from the 2026 Razzies.
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