Even as a music video, Hurry Up Tomorrow would be excruciating

This kind of imagery is a specialty from director Trey Edward Shults, whose last movie was the similarly overwrought but dissimilarly watchable Waves. He ought to feel flattered that Tesfaye saw no possible way to rip off his style, could think of no alternative but to hire him to tell this story at feature length. Waves is show-offy and emotional and sometimes ill-advised in its melodramatic flourishes. It was a divisive film. Hurry Up Tomorrow will unite a nation. Lionsgate has acquired an A24 movie ready to be hawked in the parking lot after a concert.

The movie is oddly coy about whether or not Tesfaye and Anima have sex at the end of their magical evening, though she spends the night in his hotel room and it seems likely that they’ve shard something more than soulful looks. Regardless, the next morning the magic has faded, creating a conflict between the two of them when one attempts to coldly disassociate from the other. This might sound like a description of the first 30 or 40 minutes, as is customary in a review; rather, this is most of the movie, an unavoidable pitfall in describing a story where nothing much happens. Much of what remains teases a riff on Misery with dashes of Vanilla Sky and American Psycho, which Ortega gamely enacts by giddily dancing to a couple of Weeknd tracks while half-explaining the lyrics. This does not cheer The Weeknd up, which makes him seem ungrateful in addition to wooden.

Ortega, however, is ideally cast as the only person in the movie anyone would ever want to spend any time with. The more erratic her behavior becomes, the more sympathetic she appears; whatever it takes to end this movie, girl. She has a wonderfully expressive face, like a bold-lined comic-book drawing come to life; compared to the rest of Hurry Up Tomorrow, regarding images of Ortega shot on film is a splendid use of time. In a movie that actually bothered to explore the uneasy three-way intimacy between fan, artist, and art, she would almost certainly give a good performance. Likely so would Barry Keoghan, who appears here briefly as a hectoring friend of Tesfaye—at one point he seems to refer to the failure of the HBO series The Idol—and acts determined to turn his offbeat charisma into shtick.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is pure shtick, none of it funny. Shults changes aspect ratios and halfheartedly revives some 360-degree shots from Waves. Tesfaye grapples self-pityingly with his weaknesses. Keoghan natters. Everyone sheds elegant tears when recalling the vague traumas of their backstory. The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.

Director: Trey Edward Shults
Writers: Trey Edward Shults, Abel Tesfaye, Reza Fahim
Starring: Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan
Release Date: May 16, 2025