Trey Edward Shults drenches his movies. Anyone who saw the writer-director’s 2019 film Waves will know that film is dripping wet with style, super saturated with colour and intense emotion. It’s a dangerous approach to filmmaking if you’re not good at it, but Shults is good at it.

It’s not Shults’ tendencies toward self-indulgence we have to worry about in his new film, Hurry Up Tomorrow. It’s those of his co-writer and star, Abel Tesfaye, otherwise known as The Weeknd. The style comes in the form of a deep dive into the subjectivity and pretty pain of a rock star. But it’s not just any rock star, it’s Abel Tesfaye, otherwise known as The Weeknd. Instead of playing a thinly veiled version of himself, he plays himself – quite well, I might add, as it’s often considered one of the most difficult tasks for an actor to act like him or herself. The acting chops of the singer is not Hurry Up Tomorrow’s problem, it’s the themes and story they use those chops to pursue.

There’s some literal drenching at the start of Hurry Up Tomorrow, as the film opens with a distraught woman (Jenna Ortega) dousing a house in the middle of a wintry wasteland with gasoline, ready to torch it. This extended one-shot follows an extended one-shot in which The Weeknd is preparing for a stadium show, which has a similar vibe for him of a boxer prepping for a fight, and both shots follow an opening voicemail in which a crying woman accuses the singer of being a bad person for treating her this way. This suggests a toxic relationship that will get investigated, not usually with very much depth, as the movie progresses.

At The Weeknd’s side is his manager, Lee (Barry Keoghan), who is trying to encourage him to continue with his current tour despite strained throat muscles the doctor tells him he really should rest before he continues performing. Lee’s idea seems to be that enough bumps of cocaine will overcome the physical hump for Abel. Perhaps worse than any injury is that Abel has just heard this voicemail from what now appears to be his ex-girlfriend, and it’s totally taken him out of the necessary headspace for a show. The distraught woman who left the burning house in her rearview mirror emerges from the crowd, for the beginning of a 24-hour period none of them will soon forget.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes a while before it calls its star by name, leaving us expecting that this is a fictitious musician who just closely resembles Abel Tesfaye. Write what you know, right? That’s kind of the model forged by Prince in Purple Rain and others who have tried to cross over in front of the camera, but recognise they are best suited to play versions of themselves. From the evidence of this film, Tesfaye may be capable of more than that, though he did also play himself in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems.

Once it becomes clear that this is, in fact, The Weeknd – abundantly so when Ortega’s character, called Anima in the credits, begins psychoanalysing specific Weeknd hits like “Blinding Lights” – a little part of our hope for this project dies. Even a thinly veiled version of The Weeknd would likely be a bit self-indulgent, but the more this gets into the character’s actual real-life specifics, the more it tries our patience.

It would be reasonable to jump to Tesfaye’s defence by suggesting it’s more honest, and definitely more personal, to lift the ruse that he’s playing a character rather than himself. It’s certainly consistent with the way modern stars lay themselves bare on social media. However, it increases the movie’s sense of solipsism tenfold, and we start getting the impression that this great-looking movie is no better than an extended music video – The Weeknd already being someone who likes to cram narrative content into his videos.

Then there’s the characterisation of Ortega’s character. The symbolically named character of Anima – in Jungian philosophy, it’s the feminine part of a man’s personality, and also means the soul – is a trainwreck never granted the dignity of an explanation for what made her this way. Her relationship with Abel turns out to be different from what the film’s opening suggests it is, and for a time, it seems like she might be his manic pixie dream girl, which would also be limiting in terms of her agency. Her actual personality is much worse than that. It’s the sort of dubious portrayal that earns the film charges of possible sexism. There isn’t any need to be accusatory about why it doesn’t work; it’s her conception as the embodiment of Abel’s self-loathing that’s the big miss here.

On a purely sensory level, Hurry Up Tomorrow is certainly a vibe. Tesfaye’s score (with Daniel Lopatin), heavy with the retro synth that characterises The Weeknd’s music, is a perfect accompaniment to the immersive and vertiginous camerawork of DP Chayse Irvin, which regularly does 360s around the actors it’s capturing. Shults’ own editing continues the pleasant assault. If you wanted to spend the movie’s 106 minutes just admiring the technical bravura, you could, and you might find it superficially enriching on that level.

But you know what else looks really good and has good music, assuming you like the artist? A music video. And Shults’ previous three features – Krisha and It Comes at Night, in addition to Waves – do not suggest that he’s in this business to make music videos. Though who knows, he has now also shot two videos related to this movie for Tesfaye. As for Tesfaye, well, he can actually act. It just may be time for him to do it as someone other than himself.

 

Hurry Up Tomorrow is currently playing in cinemas.