Hurry Up Tomorrow, directed by Trey Edward Shults (known for Waves and It Comes at Night) and written by Abel Tesfaye and Trey Edward Shults, follows the story of Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, a musician tormented by insomnia who is led by a mysterious woman on a journey that challenges his very existence.
From the very first seconds of Hurry Up Tomorrow, we are ripped from the real world and thrown into a dimension where image, sound, and emotion merge into something that defies traditional cinematic classification. It’s not just a film. It’s a state of mind. It’s an intimate diary filmed with the aesthetic boldness of someone who’s no longer afraid to show themselves as they are: broken, brilliant, contradictory, and deeply human. Directed with impressive visual finesse and heavily influenced by Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), the film is a sensory journey that resembles a visual opera more than a conventional narrative. Each scene feels crafted like an extended music video, where the camera movement, meticulously composed framing, and explosive color palette transport us to an alternate reality, one in which time is liquid, emotions take form, and sound is just as much a protagonist as the image.
If you’re a fan of The Weeknd, get ready: Hurry Up Tomorrow will hit you hard. It’s both a celebration and a deconstruction of the artist the public knows. Abel uses the film as a mirrored reflection of his musical career, bringing to the surface themes already present in his songs such as loneliness, hedonism, addiction, identity, faith, and the tension between desire and redemption, now translated into visuals so powerful they feel tattooed onto your retina. There’s a touching vulnerability in his performance. Abel doesn’t play a character, he exposes himself. There is no distance between the artist and the human here; the line is thin, almost nonexistent. He turns his wounds into visual poetry, inviting the viewer to inhabit his thoughts, memories, dreams, and nightmares. It’s as if we’re wandering through an emotional museum, where each room reveals a fragment of his soul. Visually, the film is stunning. The cinematography leans on saturated colors, pulsating lights, and aggressive contrasts that evoke both expressionism and the aesthetics of today’s most ambitious music videos. The use of color is never arbitrary, it communicates. Intense reds signal pain and passion, deep blues suggest isolation, vibrant yellows create a hallucinatory atmosphere. Everything is designed to amplify emotional content through aesthetics.
The camera movement is fluid, often dreamlike. At times, it seems to float, as if guided by an invisible force, perhaps Abel’s own emotions. This approach draws the viewer closer to the protagonist’s subjectivity. There are long takes that unfold like silent choreography, guiding the eye with precision, while the soundtrack, composed of tracks from his new album alongside reinterpretations of hits like Blinding Lights, serves as the emotional engine for each scene.
Barry Keoghan portrays Lee, Abel’s agent. But more than just a manager, Lee is the personification of the system that tries to mold artists into products, an archetype of the industry that profits from suffering packaged in aesthetic beauty. Barry delivers a disturbingly ambiguous performance. Lee doesn’t yell or coerce with explicit violence, but he’s always present, manipulating with a smile, dodging with vague phrases, and controlling with the calm of someone who’s watched many artists lose their way.
Lee represents the conflict between authenticity and performance. He constantly tries to push Abel back into a persona the public expects, even when the artist is searching for something more truthful. It’s as if Lee is the anchor preventing Abel from escaping to creative freedom, or perhaps the mirror forcing him to face his own compromises. Keoghan’s performance is subtle, full of subtext, and absolutely essential to the film’s paranoid, suffocating tone.
On the other hand, Anima, the mysterious girl played by Jenna Ortega, enters Abel’s life like lightning in a storm. She appears after one of his shows, shrouded in mystery, almost like a vision. Anima is the opposite of Lee. She doesn’t try to control Abel, but rather challenges him, deconstructs him, drags him into dangerous and revealing places within himself.
Jenna Ortega delivers a hypnotic performance. Her presence on screen is always unsettling, at times ethereal, at times brutally real. Anima never explains who she is, and that’s part of the magic. She functions as a living symbol of everything Abel has repressed: his purest impulses, his sensitivity, his need for genuine connection. Their relationship is chaotic, intense, and deeply symbolic. Her character leads Abel to question what is real, what is a dream, and what the cost is of living authentically in a world that demands masks.
However, the film does have a significant issue. For those unfamiliar with The Weeknd’s lyrical and sonic universe, Hurry Up Tomorrow may feel hermetic, even indecipherable. The narrative, often abstract and symbolic, doesn’t bother to explain anything. There’s no exposition, no didacticism. You have to be willing to feel before you understand. And for many, that will be a challenge.
Those who enter the theater expecting a linear story with a clear beginning, middle, and end may leave frustrated. The film doesn’t offer answers or solutions. It demands emotional engagement, cultural awareness, and above all, a certain intimacy with Abel’s body of work. Without that, many of the symbols, metaphors, and aesthetic choices may seem like excess or self-indulgence.
Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t about liking or not liking. It’s about connecting or not. It’s a deeply personal work that makes no effort to be accessible. Its beauty lies precisely in its unconditional surrender to inner chaos. Abel Tesfaye refuses to explain himself. He just shows. And invites us to dive in with him.
For fans, it’s an unforgettable, almost liturgical experience. For those unfamiliar with his journey, it may be an invitation to explore it. Either way, it’s a bold artistic achievement that challenges traditional musical cinema and redefines what it means to tell a story through multimedia art.
In the end, Hurry Up Tomorrow doesn’t want to entertain you, it wants to transform you. And if you allow it, it succeeds.
Hurry Up Tomorrow releases in theaters on May 16.
