Carter Haskins

Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)

May 18th, 2025

I don’t want to call it a failure, but what happened?

The status of The Weeknd’s persona as a “character” he plays is helplessly vague, something encouraged by the man himself. It’s quite confusing, he truly seems to be a misogynistic asshole and yet boasts collaborations with the likes of David Lynch, Daft Punk and Florence Welch. His film and television projects don’t offer any sort of help either. Both The Idol and Hurry Up Tomorrow are dripping in narcissism and misogyny, with little to no legible self-awareness. The rare moments of self-reflection are jarring and genuinely funny, throwing into question how seriously The Weeknd is taking all of this.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure one can really claim “playing a character” while dating an 18 year old Bella Hadid at the age of 25, but that also could have been before he turned things around and started playing up the persona. This train of thought doesn’t last long though, given his relationship with Diddy, which has been pretty constant, with the two even releasing two songs together as recently as 2023. More recently The Weeknd participated in a particularly appalling collaboration with OpenAI, “reconfiguring his body with Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD and uploading his former self to an OpenAI GPT.” Claiming to be playing a character is all fine and good until you are spending time with sex felons and destroying the world.

The Weeknd’s film and television collaborators—Sam Levinson and Trey Edward Shults—are two quintessential modern “all style, no substance” directors, both widely hated by the critics and non-critics in my circle alike. They are disliked, conversely to the way their films operate, for how they act and their filmic eccentricities rather than the true content of their work. They are both bigoted in their own ways, and perfectly align with The Weeknd’s persona. I can’t help but believe he gets into a room with these directors and just lets them run with what they know about “The Weeknd.” The rare self-reflective moments must come from The Weeknd throwing earnest suggestions in during the process, but a guess is about as good as we’re going to get.

That’s the issue with this movie. Edwards Shults’ completely sauceless and utterly moronic filmmaking gets in the way of anything this could have possibly had going for it. The Weeknd’s own self-mythologizing, however filmically undeserved, drags the runtime out to a numbing degree. But the highs are quite high, the one scene that has been doing the rounds on social media as a joke is very intentionally funny, and it works. And Jenna Ortega American Psycho, are you kidding me???