Hurry Up Tomorrow
2025-05-14
Vancouver, BC

Being a fan of The Weeknd's work is a prerequisite to any kind of meaningful understanding of this film, knowing it’s drawing from a real incident. The mystique that The Weeknd has built throughout his career is rooted in the unknown — from being faceless during the Trilogy days, to the red suit character from After Hours, and the old man caught in purgatory in Dawn FM. But now he has gone meta, and I can’t help but feel indifferent about what he's presenting here. In the lead up to this album and film, he has fixated on the incident at SoFi, touting a narrative drawing from the events and fallout from that night. But I find myself asking, and I don't want to trivialize it, but why should I care? It just reads to me as egocentric. If we want to get controversial, there's a whole other side to this incident, referring to the fans in attendance that night. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to it, myself having witnessed a concert of his getting cancelled, the opening night Toronto stop on the same tour (Rogers outage). But labelling this a vanity project is totally fair, because that's genuinely what it is. Bundling it up in a theatrical package that he has touted as being "Lynchian" and "for the fans" feels so out of touch. If he needed to get this out of his system, fine, but do it as a 30 minute YouTube film. I don't think anyone was asking for this.

Watched at an early fan screening at Scotiabank Theatre Vancouver.