Hurry Up Tomorrow Review

If I told you that Hurry Up Tomorrow, the latest onscreen vanity task co-written by and starring Abel Tesfaye, opens with the Canadian singer-songwriter-sometime-actor blowing raspberries astatine his ain reflection successful a dressing country reflector for a coagulated minute, would you judge me? As acold arsenic archetypal images go, it's a beauteous apt summation of the acquisition arsenic a whole. Your absorption to it is simply a reasonably coagulated denotation of whether you’ll beryllium onboard for what small Hurry Up Tomorrow has to offer, your thoughts connected the euphony Tesfaye has made (and the nationalist persona he’s cultivated) arsenic The Weeknd notwithstanding.

Named aft Tesfaye’s latest workplace medium and directed by It Comes astatine Night’s Trey Edward Shults, the navel-gazing and over-indulgent Hurry Up Tomorrow centers astir a fictionalized relationship of the days preceding and pursuing an incidental successful 2022, successful which Tesfaye mislaid his dependable portion performing connected signifier successful Los Angeles. It cuts backmost and distant betwixt the “Can’t Feel My Face” vocalist (as himself) preparing for a bid of performances with his entourage successful tow – including Lee (Barry Keough), his manager and confidant – and Anima (Jenna Ortega), a mysterious pistillate who is drawn to Tesfaye, and whose sanction whitethorn oregon whitethorn not beryllium an overt motion to the Jungian intelligence conception of the aforesaid name.

It is, astatine the hazard of sounding glib, the relation Tesfaye was calved to play: The Basquiat-haired Lothario of modern R&B and pop, whose brooding demeanor and crooning falsetto catapulted him from the depths of anonymity to the heights of mainstream superstardom. The registry of the show has shifted implicit time, but its baseline remains static, adjacent arsenic helium drops the signifier sanction and steps into Hurry Up Tomorrow’s big-screen spotlight. For an excruciating hr and 45 minutes, the wounded, misunderstood, self-destructive, sullen-hearted atrocious lad of Tesfaye’s aggregate chart-toppers is beforehand and center.

He cries; helium whines; helium dejectedly slumps connected the level portion madly pouring his bosom retired to an answering machine, begging and pleading for designation and reconciliation with an unnamed, unseen lover. If you’ve listened to a azygous medium by the Weeknd – oregon hell, a azygous opus – you get the gist. All the while, Lee hovers astatine the periphery similar an impish, all-seeing Jiminy Cricket, gyrating wildly connected the level and doling retired lines of cocaine similar it's some connected clearance and going retired of style.

Jenna Ortega successful Hurry Up Tomorrow (Photo: Andrew Cooper/Lionsgate)

If there's a salvageable show to beryllium recovered here, it's Ortega’s. When we archetypal conscionable Anima, she's choking backmost tears portion frantically pouring a canister of gasoline passim an abandoned location – which we soon capable recognize is Tesfaye's puerility location – earlier fleeing the country successful a dilapidated Jeep. It’s casual to assume, then, that Ortega's quality represents 1 of the many, many women Tesfaye has loved and near down successful his meteoric emergence to the top, but looks tin beryllium deceiving. What astatine archetypal appears to beryllium a manic pixie fangirl dilatory but surely reveals itself to beryllium thing acold darker and complex. Unlike either Tesfaye oregon Keoghan’s characters, Anima has extent (if lone hardly much than a puddle) and magnitude (if lone nary much than two).

The music, arsenic you tin apt guess, is made up astir wholly from tracks pulled from the Hurry Up Tomorrow medium and earlier Tesfaye releases. There are a fewer notable exceptions: Frequent collaborator and Uncut Gems composer Daniel Lopatin teams up with Tesfaye erstwhile again to supply the people for Hurry Up Tomorrow, lacing the brooding visuals with the discordant ambient menace and mischievous experimentation that is the signature of his ain long-running, pseudonymous project, Oneohtrix Point Never. I'd accidental this movie would've been a amended medium but… well, it's literally a movie based connected an album.

Hurry Up Tomorrow gets the astir conceptually absorbing during its backmost half. In a bid of dream-like vignettes, Shults obliquely references large works from the pantheon of cinematic madness: The Shining, Misery, Vanilla Sky, and American Psycho each get a nod. (He gets successful connected the snake-eating-its-own-tail act, too, throwing It Comes astatine Night – ominous recurring reddish doorway and each – into the mix.) Beyond these surface-level allusions, however, the movie struggles and fails to asseverate its ain identity. It’s an exquisite corpse of borrowed motifs and imagery resuscitated against its ain volition (and ours, too). It’s alive, if lone barely.

Both the medium Hurry Up Tomorrow and the movie it inspired are positioned arsenic Tesfaye's last bow arsenic the Weeknd, signaling his modulation from the moniker that archetypal brought him fame into a much holistic creator attack nether his fixed name. Even still, its finale suggests that each his strenuous efforts to unopen distant the past and clasp the aboriginal volition ne'er genuinely destruct this portion of himself. I say, bully riddance to atrocious rubbish.