The newly released, Hurry Up Tomorrow, starring 3x Grammy-winner The Weeknd, Jenna Ortega, and Barry Keoghan, takes us deep into the mind of an artist tortured by himself.
I sat down with director Trey Edward Shults, who has directed three stunning A24 films in a row: Krisha (2015), a Thanksgiving film from hell; It Comes at Night (2017), a psychological horror; and Waves (2019), a lush tale of a tragic high schooler.
Trey shared what makes Hurry Up Tomorrow his most visually phantasmagorical film to date:
“The literal narrative kind of plays with dream versus reality and this kind of mental breakdown, psychological headspace, and Jungian psychology.”
This film burrows into the mind of The Weeknd, who plays a version of himself—an international superstar plagued by the belief that without his art, he is worthless.
To the world, he is, as his tour manager (Keoghan) puts it, a “supernatural being, a superhero to them.” But to himself, he is incapable of love—a justification he uses for rampant self-destruction.
What’s so visually arresting about the work is that Shults has perfected a directorial style designed to capture fractured states of mental breakdown. In one standout sequence, The Weeknd enters a nightclub, engulfed in a manic energy—a club moving at the speed of his synapses misfiring.
Trey explained:
“We could go deeper with the subjectivity in a way that was honest to the narrative… the camera is honest to the character’s headspace.”
The film is so subjective, though, so consumed with the visual and sonic poetry that Shults and The Weeknd, who co-authored the project, have created, that we miss out on some critical elements that could have grounded this and made it profound.
Perhaps that’s why there’s been some backlash to the film, because it opens with The Weeknd in pain, and each successive moment is just more and more devastating.
But that descent makes the flickers of hope feel blissful.
When the film finally lifts in the second act, with a meet-cute between The Weeknd and Jenna Ortega, who is reliably powerful, it feels like a moment of true spiritual connection.
The challenge with Hurry Up Tomorrow is that it’s missing a first act. The entire film is a series of visually stunning effects without a cause.
The multitude of breakdowns that The Weeknd has in the film would all be wonderful and justified if time had been devoted to a first act, or bare minimum an inciting incident that showed The Weeknd in a state of romantic satisfaction.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is in theaters across the US starting today.
Want to dive deeper into Shults’ work?
Hurry Up Tomorrow shares a lot of DNA with his first film, Krisha (2015).
It employs a radical cinematic style to capture the operatic breakdown of an aunt as she tries to reconnect with her family.
Shults made the feature film twice. It’s a wild tale of perseverance and filmic courage, detailed in the interview above.
His previous feature, Waves (2019), is an amazingly tragic, lush, vibrant tale of a high schooler, paired with a tale of redemption at the end.
Shults explained:
“It’s a character portrait that was subjective film grammar kind of meeting like a neorealism kind of you know what i mean like it was uh like we tried to make the performances in the world and everything just very specific and realistic to florida but then the camera was always expressive and honest to where his headspace was.”
Check out the trailer here:
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