‘Hurry Up Tomorrow,’ Ending Explained
Hurry Up Tomorrow unfolds as a psychological odyssey centered on a globally renowned musician with insomnia and mental breakdown in the slow cooker. Directed by and starring Abel Tesfaye—formerly known as The Weeknd, currently known as Abel Tesfaye, and possibly known tomorrow as something else entirely—the film is a surrealist farewell to his alter ego. It’s indulgent, it’s cryptic, it’s not always coherent.Let’s get this out of the way: Hurry Up Tomorrow is not a movie in the traditional sense. Noir lighting and a haunting synth orchestral score does not a movie make. Where does the inspiration for the movie come from? The film draws inspiration from a real-life incident in 2022 when Tesfaye lost his voice during a concert, serving as a catalyst for the story's exploration of identity and self-destruction.The plot, such as it is, starts in free fall. Tesfaye’s character—also named Abel, pause for subtlety—loses his voice onstage during a massive stadium show. One second he’s crooning, the next he’s gasping, and then the screen snaps to black. When we rejoin him, he's holed up in a sterile hotel room, surrounded by voiceless handlers and memory fragments.Enter: Anima. Played by Jenna Ortega, we meet Anima as she is burning her home down as a pregame to one of Abel’s concerts. Simultaneously, Abel, under the pressure of his career and personal turmoil, is diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia. Despite his manager Lee's (Barry Keoghan) encouragement to perform, Abel's voice falters on stage, leading him to abruptly end the show. Backstage, Anima appears to Abel as a fan, then a muse, then—probably—a hallucination. She is not real. Welcome back, The Sixth Sense.Anima leads Abel down a nocturnal rabbit hole of increasingly unhinged set pieces: a silent cab ride through a city that looks vaguely like downtown L.A. but smells like purgatory; a motel bathtub full of black roses; a rave full of masked doppelgängers dancing to a slowed-down version of “Starboy.” This is the part where the movie stops pretending to care about narrative. We get flashbacks (or are they dreams?) of Abel as a child watching his mother cry during an eviction. We see him in a recording studio, singing into a mic that slowly turns into a noose. We watch Anima smear lipstick across his face, whispering, “You made me up so you could forget.”And then comes the fire…Related StoryHow to Watch ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’What happens at the end of Hurry Up Tomorrow?In the film’s hypnotic climax on a windswept rooftop, Anima drenches Abel in gasoline and strikes a match. He burns, but doesn’t die. He stands in the flames, blank-faced, glowing like a saint on fire. A loud metaphor for death and rebirth, Abel emerges unscathed, suggesting a transformation and the shedding of his former persona, The Weeknd. Cut to: a final shot of Abel walking, alone, into the morning light. Silent and unbranded.Tesfaye has been teasing the death of “The Weeknd” for years now, and Hurry Up Tomorrow is less a story than a Gucci-clad funeral. Of course, the vanity project’s art-school symbolism and elliptical dialogue—“Do you love the dream or the sleeper?”, an actual line—will leave some viewers shivering with The Idol flashbacks. For those tuned into Tesfaye’s wavelength—equal parts Prince, Lynch, and Tumblr—it’s a mostly entertaining piece of personal myth-making.Hurry Up Tomorrow is now playing in theaters. Get Tickets Now
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