a review of hurry up tomorrow (film).

Call him a misogynist, a narcissist, or a fame-hungry dementor — Hurry Up Tomorrow, arguably one of 2025’s most controversial films, is Abel Tesfaye’s unflinching response to the music industry and the listeners who helped shape, praise, and crucify him.

Abel Tesfaye, professionally known as The Weeknd, needs no introduction. Twenty Eight isn’t just a bonus track on his debut mixtape, House of Balloons — it’s also the number of his songs that have crossed a billion streams. Last December, Spotify honored him with multiple plaques as the most decorated artist in their aptly named “Billions Club,” even letting him host a private concert at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica for the top 1% of his listeners — a show I was invited to, but had to miss due to being under the weather. This was, indeed, a great loss for me since I have been a fan of his work since the Kiss Land days, when his music felt like an underground secret.

In stark contrast with the glittering metrics that adorn his stellar career, Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t chasing approval. The film leans into discomfort — drawing not just from Tesfaye’s own public scandals, but from cinematic influence too. Its DNA owes as much to the twisted fan-devotion of Stephen King’s Misery as it does to the backlash surrounding The Idol. It’s part confession, part provocation: a surrealist plunge into what it means to be desired, discarded, and devoured. From the opening scene, Tesfaye dares the audience to question whether they’re watching a vanity project or a requiem — and that ambiguity has split critics right down the middle.

I wasn’t even planning to watch Hurry Up Tomorrow right away. It wasn’t released in my country, and there was no official streaming offer either. But then, I saw an instagram post from someone who claims to “LOVE” The Weeknd, flipping off the movie poster while calling it the most forgettable movie he has ever seen. Brother, if that’s the most forgettable movie you’ve ever seen, you clearly haven’t watched enough movies! The reaction set off something inside me — it felt performative — and I knew I had to watch it right away.

If I were in Los Angeles, I would’ve happily paid to see it in theatres — twice, maybe more. Instead, I had to settle for a grainy theatre recording someone uploaded online. Crooked angle, the occasional background coughing — but I didn’t care. I watched it anyway. I had to. Because if people were this pressed about it, I wanted to know what exactly they were so desperate to dismiss.

The film opens with Abel Tesfaye doing lip trills repeatedly, sweat beading on his face. This intense warm-up immediately conveys the physical and emotional pressure Abel is under as he prepares for the Halloween concert. Shortly after, he punches a heavy bag, symbolizing how the music industry seems ready to take any hit just for success. The scene feels raw and vulnerable, showing Abel channeling his nervous energy but also highlighting the brutal grind he faces behind the scenes.

Next, the film presents a surreal moment where Anima, played by Jenna Ortega, burns down a mirror and the house it reflects — Abel’s childhood home. This burning foreshadows the disintegration of Abel’s sense of self. Anima — literally defined as the feminine part of a man’s brain by Carl Jung — represents the female, emotional side of his psyche, and her destruction of the house reflects the painful loss of innocence and stability. As the house burns down, Anima drives her car while Red Terror plays in a background, a song where The Weeknd apologises to his mother as she repeatedly urges him that his father will return. She ignores texts from her mother, a scene that echoes The Weeknd’s real-life relationship with his own mother, who remains a constant figure of care and worry amidst his chaotic world.

The narrative then cuts to a partying scene where São Paulo plays in the background, evoking vibes from The Weeknd’s Dawn FM Experience short film. This flows into Abel’s depiction of his hedonistic lifestyle, with Timeless featuring Playboi Carti playing in the background. Notably, two girls kiss in a scene that fans interpret as a nod to The Weeknd’s public fascination with lesbian relationships ever since his Kiss Land era. An article in The Atlantic hypothesizes that men are fascinated by lesbian relationships as they subvert evolutionary principles, adding to the fantasy aspect of them. To me, this symbolizes how out of touch The Weeknd is with reality when he engages in hedonism.

As the night of The Weeknd’s Halloween concert in Los Angeles approaches, he is diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia, and considers cancelling the performance. To add to his anxiety, he sends a voicemail to an ex-girlfriend before the concert, where his tone shifts from nonchalant to frustrated, angry, and narcissistic, as he tells her she will amount to nothing while he remains an icon and legend, which sounds more like a reaffirmation than anything else. He is consoled by Lee, played by Barry Keoghan, who subtly reminds viewers of La Mar Taylor, cofounder of The Weeknd’s record label and his former high school dropout friend. Lee’s pep talk before the halloween night concert on the following night highlights their close bond and shared history.

At the Halloween concert, Anima stands front row. The camera lingers on her and Abel locking eyes, silently but unmistakably recognizing each other. It’s electric. She is not there by coincidence — she is the emotional force he has been suppressing, now unavoidable, staring back at him beneath stage lights.

Then — disaster. Abel loses his voice mid-performance. The crowd begins to boo, and reality starts to fracture. Fans may know that this incident is inspired by the real life incident at Sofi Stadium, where The Weeknd lost his voice during his performance — he apologised profusely for this, but the apology was cut from the movie, seemingly symbolising how his regret was drowned in the booing from the crowd. In the movie, Abel walks off stage, humiliated and adrift. As he leaves the venue, Anima runs behind him. They barely speak, but she gets into his car. The quiet car ride to Santa Monica Pier represents a rare moment of introspection and vulnerability amidst chaos. This silence reflects Abel’s desire to retreat inward, to seek peace and connect with his feminine side rather than the external world. When they finally reach the Santa Monica Pier, the screen is filled with different shades of blue, from steel to turquoise, capturing the beauty of the Westside. These scenes feel like they’re using flashtime.

Afterward, they head to the Biltmore Hotel, which is notably also the last sighting of Elizabeth Short,, known as the Black Dahlia, before she went missing, and this detail interestingly foreshadows the events that unfold. In general, the Biltmore Hotel does look like it comes straight out of a psychological horror film, and many Angelinos believe it to be haunted. The building is filled with red doors, a subtle homage to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (also, happy 45th anniversary to The Shining, celebrating its 45th anniversary on the day I’m writing this post!). As they settle into their hotel room, Abel plays Anima a voice recording of a song — the title track Hurry Up Tomorrow, from his new album of the same name. It’s one of the only times in the film we see him surrender — not to fame, not to expectation, but to tenderness. Anima is moved to tears by the lyrics of the song, opening up about her abandonmentship with her father, and how she was raised by an overbearing single mother. They share an intimate moment, and are implied to spend the night together.

However, peace doesn’t last long. The next morning, Anima is overheard by Abel to be arguing with her mother on a voice call about burning down the childhood home, subtly implying that she is a part of The Weeknd’s psyche, and isn’t real. When Anima asks to go on tour with Abel, he reacts with irritation and rejection, trying to silence the part of himself she embodies. This echoes his struggle with toxic masculinity and the emotional repression he battles throughout the film. This results in Anima attacking him, knocking him out of consciousness.

Later, Abel finds himself tied to a bed by Anima, crying and cursing. This intense subplot is inspired by the 1990 psychological horror-thriller film Misery, inspired by Stephen King’s novel of the same name, about Paul Sheldon, a novelist who is rescued from a car crash by his self-proclaimed “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes (played by Kathy Bates, who is amazing in this role). What begins as care quickly turns into captivity, as Annie demands Paul rewrite the ending to his latest novel to her liking. When he resists, she becomes increasingly violent, culminating in the now-iconic scene where she breaks his ankles to keep him from escaping. The film explores obsession, control, and the terrifying power dynamics between creator and audience. In the original novel, Stephen King intended for Annie Wilkes to be a symbol for painkiller addiction, and similarly, Tesfaye uses a similar character to represent his emotional side. Anima demands that Abel find a way to sing for her the same way he would at any concert, and demand her satisfaction. She also seems to obsess over him in the same way Annie Wilkes does — her phone background is The Weeknd-themed, and she plays songs like Gasoline and Blinding Lights as Abel is tied to the bed, subsequently torturing him with his own art. She snarkily reminds him how “no one has seen the Gasoline music video” — a sly, metafictional nod to the way certain emotional projects go unnoticed or are dismissed. She is unrelenting. She wants him to feel. He just wants her to go away.

Lee eventually comes to the Biltmore in search of The Weeknd, apologising for pressuring him to go on stage. He ends up coming face-to-face with Anima, who stabs him out of frustration — symbolically representing that Abel was mentally still processing his grief, and only halfway there since he felt angry at everything that caused the incident. The stabbing is also foreshadowed by the red doors of the Biltmore in a similar way that the red elevators in The Shining foreshadowed the iconic flowing blood scene.

After Anima returns from the stabbing, she decides to burn down the hotel, along with Abel inside it. As a last resort, when he is absolutely forced to confront his emotions — represented in the film as a staggering choice between life or death — he finally ends up being able to sing. This results in Anima feeling emotional — both because of the beauty of his music, and a sense of pride. She decides to let Abel go, and he walks out of the Biltmore as it burns to the ground. Visibly shaken by the incidents, this scene fades into him going through pre-concert routines again, ready to perform as usual, symbolizing that this is a cycle he will have to go through throughout his life.

Like Misery, Tesfaye’s film uses the framework of captivity — not just physical, but emotional — to critique the parasitic relationship between artist and audience. But unlike Misery, which paints the fan as the monster, Hurry Up Tomorrow dares to ask: What if the fan is also a part of the artist? What if the horror isn’t someone else’s obsession, but your own reflection?

The criticism of Hurry Up Tomorrow is yet another gentle reminder that critiques have never been kind to genre-defying films, from David Lynch’s Eraserhead to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. For instance, a negative review by Clint Worthington at RogertEbert.com states that Anima is unnamed throughout the film, when actually her name is used by Abel several times in the film, often shortened to Ani (like Annie Wilkens, get it?). After negative prejudice as a result of The Idol, basically no film critic is able to look at this movie through an unbiased lens. So here’s my suggestion: form your own opinion before you pose with a middle finger before a Hurry Up Tomorrow movie poster.