Beneath the lurid adrenaline of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” which Billboard classified as the No. 1 song of all time in 2021, is really a story of emptiness, explains Anima (Jenna Ortega). A superfan of the singer, she tells this to the Weeknd (a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye) himself — while his hands are bound to the bedposts in a hotel room.
Like an acid-trip pop-star spin on Stephen King’s “Misery,” this sequence from “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a filmic companion to Tesfaye’s latest album (supposedly his final one as the Weeknd), is in some ways the most apt manifestation of the story his music has always circled around: the devil’s bargain of fame, the hedonism that offers a fun-house portal to self-oblivion.
But the film, directed by Trey Edward Shults, who wrote the screenplay with Tesfaye, primarily amounts to an overextended music videothatshrinks and cheapens the universe that the Weeknd’s songs gesture toward. Tesfaye plays himself as a heartbroken superstar who exists in a seemingly perpetual bender alongside his best friend and manager, Lee (Barry Keoghan). After losing his voice onstage during a show (based on Tesfaye’s real experience), he finds solace in Anima, a mysterious girl in the crowd, whose obsession with him plunges him into a kind of ego-death horror show.
This would all seem to make for a proper farewell to a musical identity that has always gravitated toward the darkly cinematic. It was in the alt-R&B sound he helped pioneer and the shadowy persona he cultivated; the conceptual trilogy of his latest three albums all featured a distinct protagonist traversing underworlds and afterlives (and, at one point, winding up with a bandaged nose à la Jack Nicholson’s private eye in “Chinatown”).
