Hurry Up Tomorrow
Starring Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan
MA15+
3/5
Not One Of The Worst Films of 2025
Hurry Up Tomorrow is an ego trip with artistic appeal that has been unfairly hailed as one of the year’s worst films.
Musician Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, stars as a fictionalised version of himself (he also co-wrote and co-produced the film), who is held hostage by an obsessed fan named Anima (Jenna Ortega).
Hurry Up Tomorrow is beautifully-shot and features a pounding, disquieting electronic score. The first act is a suitably stressful experience as Tesfaye’s drug use, painful break-up, strained voice and stress while on tour rise up to smother him, and the first act is effectively bookended by the same musical number: the first instance is an awesome success and the second a disaster.
Many critics dismissed Hurry Up Tomorrow as a vanity project for Abel, but I’d dispute this based on the sheer self-loathing on display.
While barely-written as a character, Ortega is subtly creepy as Anima, and it is tense to watch her and Abel’s fun, relaxed night out devolve into violent entrapment.
Hurry Up Tomorrow seems to be a sincere examination of Abel’s faults, but the commentary is surface-level, and this angle of self-hating honesty holds less water in the third act, with Anima as basically a crazy but cute groupie dancing in a skimpy top to Abel’s songs. You can’t bare your soul in an arthouse movie like this without stroking your ego a little, but the third act may take the ego-stroking too far, though there is a touching moment of repentance through song.
An aggressively okay film playing in a limited run in Victorian cinemas, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a blunt, wandering character piece in which not much happens, but it’s an atmospheric, hard-hitting and vibrantly-presented experience that doesn’t deserve the critical disembowelment it’s received.
