“Wash me with your fire, who else has to pay for my sins?” sings Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye on the title track of his 2025 album Hurry Up Tomorrow. The song — a moody, synthy ballad — is an apologia of sorts for, uh, something. “My love’s fabricated,” Tesfaye claims, adding later that he’s done with lies and loss. The vague-posting nature of the song’s lyrics overrides whatever earnestness the song means to project. Without specificity, it’s hard to know what Tesfaye is sorry about.
This very issue sits at the heart of Hurry Up Tomorrow — the feature film directed by Trey Edward Shults starring Tesfaye as himself that’s meant to serve as a companion piece or extremely long commercial for Hurry Up Tomorrow the album. The film is one-half Sound of Metal and one-half Misery: Unfortunately, those movies already exist. In the first half of Hurry Up Tomorrow, Tesfaye worries about his ever-weakening voice amid a relentless tour cycle where he’s tormented and inundated with partying hangers-on and lewd friend turned manager Lee (Barry Keoghan). He’s haunted by nightmares and regret over a relationship gone awry — an ex-girlfriend played by Riley Keough appears mostly in iPhone memories and old voicemails. She says something about how someone who purports to love her wouldn’t do what Tesfaye did to her — what she means by that is left ambiguous. It’s as though Tesfaye doesn’t want to actually grapple with his own mistakes, fictional or otherwise.
Enter Anima (Jenna Ortega), a Weeknd superfan with a penchant for trouble. First seen setting fire to an old house while sobbing (for some reason), she makes her way to one of his concerts where they lock eyes during one of his songs. When he loses his voice mid-show (which did happen in real life), he runs off-stage in a panic. Tesfaye and Anima connect backstage and go on a little odyssey together through a carnival, laughing and gaming and hugging. It’s all very A Star Is Born if the characters in A Star Is Born had nothing to say to each other. Back at a hotel, Tesfaye plays Anima a clip from music he’s working on — the track “Hurry Up Tomorrow” from Hurry Up Tomorrow the album — and she cries. There’s a lot of crying to Tesfaye’s music in the film, as if to inflate the importance of his popological output over the past decade.
In the morning, however, Tesfaye no longer treats Anima with a gentle kindness — he’s become cold and distant, if not outright rude. So Anima does what any crazy character in a movie would do: She whacks him over the head and ties him to the bed and then plays Tesfaye’s music to him while begging him to tell her why he’s so sad in all of his upbeat songs. She dances to “Blinding Lights” while pointing out the lyrics are really kind of a bummer while Tesfaye sobs, bound in a Christlike position to the bed. The scene is almost audaciously bad: Tesfaye’s hysteria never registers as much more than desperate adoration for his own music and Ortega can’t thread the needle between tragic outcast and “I’m your biggest fan” mania. Much of this narrative climax rests on the idea that Tesfaye’s toxicity is common knowledge — though what that means in literal terms goes unacknowledged. All we have to go on in the movie is bland asshole-ishness and his breakup with Keough’s character and that he must reckon with it in order for Anima to free him.
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Tesfaye’s most recent narrative exercise before this was HBO’s The Idol, where he played a creepy pop guru named Tedros Tedros. That character was an overt loser posing as someone cool, coaxing pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) into dirtier and sexier music through a BDSM-adjacent sexual awakening. But Jocelyn’s team and her friends — as corporate and lackey-ish as they were — knew what Tedros was, and so did Jocelyn at the end of the day. He was a low-status villain, uninterested in redemption or salvation. Playing him was a kind of self-immolation for Tesfaye. As Tedros, he was willing to debase himself in a way that drew attention to how fraudulent the pop industry was. A motivated dweeb could derail a whole career, maybe, if given the right access. The Idol was almost a noble failure, a psychically damaging look into the pop ecosystem that had the decency to fictionalize rather than mythologize its star.
Tesfaye has said he wants to retire the Weeknd persona for a while. His music has been defined by a moody, mysterious sensibility paired with upbeat party songs — a contrast that leads Ortega’s Anima to nearly set him on fire. Why does he make songs so sad? What is he hiding from the public? From his fans? From the people who love him? Tesfaye doesn’t have an answer. He just has his music, which he points to again and again as the key to understanding his misery. When he breaks into song at the end, the beauty of his music and the sincerity of his sadness convinces Anima to let him go. He survives, unburned, walking through the ashes of a destruction that could have been. He shifts from the hotel to backstage, the movie ending where it began. Looking into the mirror once again, Tesfaye takes in his reflection, more frightened by what he sees now than he was at the start.
