‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ Review: They Let The Weeknd Make a Movie

May 15, 2025

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Two people hurrying up (CREDIT: Andrew Cooper)

Starring: Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega, Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough

Director: Trey Edward Shults

Running Time: 105 Minutes

Rating: R for Some Language, a Few Drugs, and a Scuffle

Release Date: May 16, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: In the woozy fantasia Hurry Up Tomorrow, Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd plays an alternate version of himself who’s really going through some stuff right now. His girlfriend has just left him, but he can’t focus on that right now, because he’s in the midst of a tour and his manager (Barry Keoghan) keeps hyping him up to go out and crush it. But what he really needs to do right now is slow down and rest his aching vocal cords. Into this psychological powder keg waltzes an unstable fan named Anima (Jenna Ortega) who’s introduced while burning down a house in the middle of nowhere. She and Abel hit it off, only to then dive headlong into a nightmare.

What Made an Impression?: To Be So Vain: When was the last time we were blessed to witness a vanity project as shameless as this one? I didn’t realize that The Weeknd even had the cachet to get a major theatrical release like this greenlit. (Although I suppose he did play the Super Bowl Halftime Show a few years ago.) Anyway, I’m not complaining. All artists should be given the space to let their creative ids run loose (even if the results are profoundly messy), just so long as nobody gets hurt.
Will You Let Us In?: Although I suppose the case could be made that some people could in fact get hurt by suffering through the experience of watching this movie. I wouldn’t go that far, but it would’ve been nice if it had been a little esoteric. I’m enough of a fan of The Weeknd that I’ve listened to all of his albums and sung him at karaoke once or twice, but not so big a stan that I’m attending concerts or scrubbing the lyrics for Easter eggs or whatever. Maybe his most ardent obsessives will find plenty to vibe with in Hurry Up Tomorrow. I however am perfectly okay with keeping all that at arm’s length. The Weeknd’s headspace is just too dang melancholic.
Letting a Little Bit Loose: Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t too bad if you just treat it as a series of dreamy images washing over you and ignore whatever semblance of a plot there is. But within the chaos, there is one genuinely great scene in which Anima has Abel tied up Misery-style as she forces him to listen to her critical analyses of some of his recent songs. And yes, we do get a few new signature Jenna Ortega Dance Moves out of the bargain. It’s kinda stupid, but it breaks the tension nicely.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is Recommended If You Like: Being held hostage

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Phone Calls

This Is a Movie Review: ‘It Comes at Night’ Isn’t Just About Paranoia, It IS Paranoia

June 5, 2017

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , 2 Comments

This review was originally published on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Christopher Abbott, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Director: Trey Edward Shults

Running Time: 91 Minutes

Rating: R for Frequent Bouts of Vomiting Blood

Release Date: June 9, 2017

A common rule of thumb in horror is that which remains unseen makes for the scariest monsters. What if this guideline were stretched to its furthest limit? Could a total lack of evidence – the unseen itself as a concept – be the ultimate horror? The paranoia-fueled It Comes at Night makes a strong case for just that.

While the titular “It” remains beyond anyone’s perception, its effects are clear and visible right from the get-go. The film opens in a cabin in the woods, that staple of horror film settings, stripped down to its bare essentials. Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) live with their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in a most desolate location. Their first order of business is disposing of Sarah’s father Bud (David Pendleton), who has succumbed to some sort of deadly contagion that appears to be looming as a threat over the entire world. How far from society has this family removed itself? Or has civilization broken down entirely such that there is no society to detach from? How far into the future does this take place, or is this present day? Does time even matter?

All this uncertainty ensures that no happy ending can come out of someone breaking into Paul and Sarah’s thoroughly boarded-up home. Will (Christopher Abbott), the intruder, somehow manages to get an invitation out of Paul to join them in the house, along with his wife Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), but it is an uneasy peace. The two families divvy up their supplies evenly, but the issue here is not fairness, it is trust, which is impossible to establish. The specter of death in these woods is ever-present but also unknowable – anyone could be its agent, even without intending to be. A simple changing of one’s mind is cause for confrontation.

At the risk of giving too much away, I think it is important to note that It Comes at Night might not exactly be the film that its advertising makes it out to be. This is a major issue at a time when horror hounds expect visceral thrills out of something low-key like It Follows or they anticipate comprehensibility out of something inscrutable like The Witch. It Comes’ trailers give the sense that there is some monster lurking in the woods that is the source of the disease. That might be true, but that is also beside the point. It could also be a government experiment gone wrong, or it could be a nameless, faceless apocalypse-level pandemic. But the prime monster in this slice of the world is paranoia. When the structure of one’s reality breaks apart irreversibly, there is no such thing as security or sanity.

It Comes at Night is Recommended If You Like: The Thing, The Others, The Blair Witch Project

Grade: 4 out of 5 Infections