Title – Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)

Director – Trey Edward Shults (It Comes at Night)

Cast – Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan

Plot – Struggling to keep up with his career demands and personal struggles, pop superstar The Weeknd/Abel Tesfaye (Tesfaye) encounters a stranger at one of his concerts, known as Anima (Ortega), an encounter which sets in motion a series of events that will shape the very essence of the human behind the fame.  

“You see I’m tryna be nice right now, right?”

Review by Eddie on 29/08/2025

One of the most ill-advised ego trips ever committed on a large and high profile scale, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a genuine contender for 2025’s biggest miscalculation and misfire, as pop superstar The Weeknd/Abel Tesfaye teams up with talented director Trey Edward Shults to give to the world a film we never asked for.

I like many other eager cinemagoers have endured and laid witness to some weird and wacky feature films over the journey but Tomorrow is right up there with one of the oddest and most indescribable offerings I have sat through in entirety.

Reported to be an accompanying project to The Weeknd’s latest studio album but also a standalone effort in its own right, Tomorrow’s bare bones plot that follows Tesfaye through a spiralling mental breakdown that also involves Barry Keoghan’s manager Lee and Jenna Ortega’s fan Anima is barely followable and with Tesfaye’s poor acting (that made his misguided TV effort The Idol noteworthy for all the wrong reasons) front and centre more often than not, Tomorrow feels like an experimental student film gone bad.

What’s perhaps strangest about this entirely odd affair is that it’s overseen by someone as talented as Shults.

Showing great promise with his early films that took a giant step up with his underseen but brilliant drama Waves in 2019, Shults is a visionary director who could be anything. How he got talked into being a part of this project is anyone’s guess but it’s likely set his career back in a big way, equivalent to the likes of Josh Tank’s Fantastic Four or Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales/The Box career road blocks.

As Tesfaye meanders about doing throat exercises, swearing at Anima or indulging in full fledged concert numbers, one of the other most bizarre elements of Tomorrow constantly rears its head with much of this disastrously constructed feature showcasing throughout that somewhere in this mess a good film might have existed.

With a notable visual palette courtesy of Chayse Irvin and some notable score work from rising composer Daniel Lopatin (whose scores on Uncut Gems and Good Time deserve more notice) there’s ingredients within Tomorrow that elevate what’s going on around it and while their roles aren’t at all great, both Ortega and Keoghan appear committed to what they signed on for here and try their best to get things going when everything around them is such a confusing muddle of ideas and concepts.

The type of experience that could perhaps only be enjoyed by hardcore Weeknd fans that are there for him no matter what, Tomorrow is destined to be a cult film for the ages, for all the wrong reasons.

Final Say –

An utterly bizarre cinematic offering, Hurry Up Tomorrow is the type of film you can’t describe with mere words with willing viewers needing to see what’s in store for them to understand just how much wrong is to be found within this large-scale ego trip.

1 rotating camera shot out of 5