Critic Reviews

Hurry Up Tomorrow, is a risk-taking experience, a David “Lynchian” fever dream of a movie that’s as visually marvelous as it is head-scratching. It’s a “Purple Rain” for the “Euphoria” generation, and you can’t take your eyes off it.

This is not a rousing movie that people are going to come away from energized. Still, it’s an interesting approach to an extended ad for an album.

It's clearly intended to be a companion to and showcase of the simultaneously released album instead of a fleshed-out, standalone film. Regrettably, it never lets the audience forget that fact, feeling far more like a long music video than a feature film.

Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t awful. It stays at the surface, really afraid to interrogate any deeper than required, but it has its moments and aesthetic flair.

It’s no Purple Rain – though Jenna Ortega is a much better onscreen foil for Tesfaye than Apollonia was for Prince – but it at least manages to find a handful of visually stimulating moments amid the vapidity.

Tomorrow is too murky, meandering and self-indulgent an inside joke for audiences to remember it for more than its smirking moments. In time the Weeknd may come to regret this too, a missed opportunity.

Despite some impressive woozy visuals and a soundtrack of chart-topping music, there’s not much to recommend this derivative pop-star drama.

Ultimately, Hurry Up Tomorrow is an example of style over substance. Its visuals try to shock and awe while leaving its narrative a confusing mess.

Woven throughout is some conversation about absent fathers and fear of abandonment, with unearned delivery and first-draft acuity — something gesturing at depth without piercing the surface.

The film desperately tries to convince us that it’s peeling back the layers of the Weeknd’s persona in order to show you what’s really going on inside his head. But, in defiance of Anima’s wishes, Hurry Up Tomorrow lacks the honesty to confront what’s there.