'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Belongs in the Bad Movie Hall of Fame

The Weeknd should do prison time for this.

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Lionsgate

To its credit, Hurry Up Tomorrow telegraphs its status as an act of colossal hubris in the first few minutes of the film. After a much-too-long montage of the kind of abstract extreme body close-ups that every first-year photography student inevitably tortures their teacher with for a month or two, we eventually fade out, into a shot of our star, Abel Tesfaye, aka the singer The Weeknd.

Staring directly, disconcertingly at the camera, he makes one long fart sound with his lips. Then another. Then another, his lips vibrating too quickly for the speed of the film and creating a sort of strobing illusion like when the spokes on a wheel appear to go backwards on film. After three or four more hypnotic mouth farts, we eventually come to realize that he’s warming up his lips before a huge concert. Yet the scene is more telling without context. Hurry Up Tomorrow resembles nothing so much as The Weeknd mouth-farting at us for 105 minutes.

Brrrrrrrrrrrbbbbbbbb. Brrrrrrrrrrbbbbbbbb. Brrrrrrrrrrbbbbbb.

Hurry Up Tomorrow — which I saw without knowing much about, as one of two new movies opening near me, the other being the sixth installment of an already-pretty-self-explanatory horror franchise — sets a new bar on musician movie vanity projects. It makes Better Man look like Citizen Kane (which isn’t really fair to Better Man, an objectively watchable movie), and Rocket Man seem like Casablanca. Those movies are comparable in terms of hubris, but where Better Man is stupidly inspired and Rocket Man is at least competently filmed and acted, Hurry Up Tomorrow feels like The Weeknd helped a childhood friend with his impressively elaborate photography project.

I didn’t really know The Weeknd’s “whole deal” before this, other than that he was a nice-looking guy with a pleasant voice whose music sort of sounds like a more synthed-up syncopated Michael Jackson (which isn’t a bad thing). Remember when he did the half-time show at the Super Bowl? That was neat. I didn’t figure on a near-psychotic obsession with The Weeknd being a necessary pre-condition for enjoying Hurry Up Tomorrow. All I knew of it going in came from a gritty, distressed poster that told me that it starred Barry Keoghan, Jenna Ortega, and Abel Tesfaye. That now seems like a legally actionable level of bait and switch. If it had just said “starring The Weeknd as The Weeknd,” it might’ve saved us all a lot of trouble.

So, that’s what Hurry Up Tomorrow is. It’s a movie about The Weeknd starring The Weeknd, or at least, is some kind of meta-fictional portrait delving the psyche of some The Weeknd alter-ego. That alter ego? Basically, the world’s saddest fuckboi. There’s a mysterious girl who shows up only in the old pictures he looks at fondly, whose voice we also hear in voicemails that open the film. She tells him that it’s messed up the way he treated her and his mother would be ashamed of him if she knew. The Weeknd, I gather, is to women’s emotions what Lenny from Of Mice and Men is to furry animals. This girl in the photos is played by Riley Keough, one of our finest young actors, who disappointingly never appears in the movie in the flesh — another bait-and-switch. Chekov’s Keough.

This filly apparently has The Weeknd so torn up inside that he can barely sing, with a doctor eventually telling him that his larynx is all inflamed, probably from the stress of loving too hard. The only cure, according to the doc, is more cowbell. Just kidding, the cure is to rest his voice (and troubled soul!) for a while.

But rest? The Weeknd?? He can’t, he’s an international pop star! With a toxic manager, played by Barry Keoghan, who fetes him with booze and women after every show. Probably the best sequence of the film is the scene following the concert from the opening scene. The camera pans across a dimly lit pile of naked bodies, relaxing presumably post-coitus on a sumptuous pop star bed (I think I saw a nipple!) before eventually panning to a doorway. Beneath it sits The Weeknd, looking dejected while noodling on a very small keyboard. Poor guy, the drugs and sex don’t make him happy! All he has is the abiding sadness that powers his songs.

Feeling like he can’t go onstage at the next show (and presumably hungover from all the boozing, sexing, and keyboards), The Weeknd sits on the floor of the green room moping, until his manager Barry Keoghan gives him a pep talk while feeding him bump after bump of cocaine. “You are a supernatural being who was put on Earth to perform!” he assures The Weeknd.

It seems to work, and eventually The Weeknd takes the stage. Aside from the funny tiny keyboard image, one of the few genuine feelings Hurry Up Tomorrow evoked in me was the momentary desire for some of Barry Keoghan’s cocaine (must’ve been a sativa strain, promotes creativity).

The only other character in Hurry Up Tomorrow is a girl, played by Jenna Ortega (why do I always want it to be “Jenny Ortega?” Much better mouthfeel, imo), identified on IMDB but not in the movie as “Anima.” We see her burn someone’s house down in the film’s opening scene and then fleeing. Like The Weeknd, she spends most of her ensuing screen time listening to voicemails and crying. There are so many extreme closeups of eyeballs and mouths in Hurry Up Tomorrow that you’d think David Attenborough was about to start telling us about the wonderful colonies of microrganisms contained therein.

Hurry Up Tomorrow essentially contains only two kinds of shots: extreme closeups of eyes or mouths and strobey, swishy atmospheric shots of party scenes. I would’ve thought it was a film school project if I hadn’t known that it was directed by Trey Edward Schults, previously of the positively reviewed (even by me!) It Comes At Night. I imagine it’s hard to do establishing shots if you don’t have anything to establish.

The Weeknd ends up losing his voice mid-show, presumably from sadboi-induced vocal strain (exacerbated by cinematic liquor swilling). Just at that moment, he locks eyes with Jenna Ortega in the crowd. They both know it Means Something, and so she sneaks her way past security to find him, and he flees his svengali-ish manager and his life of being The Weeknd to spend a night at a strobey carnival with this mysterious pouty-lipped girl he swears he knows from somewhere. The movie implies a relationship though we weirdly never see them kiss (artistic choice or contractual one? Hard to say). At one point, she plays his songs on the stereo while dancing manically and explaining what they mean, like some hybrid of Patrick Bateman mansplaining Huey Lewis and an early 2000s iPod ad. Suddenly Hurry Up Tomorrow felt very much like an infomercial for The Weeknd. A palpable wave of second-hand embarrassment swept over the audience in my screening.