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The film — which the Toronto-born singer also co-wrote — was conceived before the creation of his official tie-in album, an edgy confection of the same name which dropped earlier this year. Themes of cultish worship, personal reflection and artistic rebirth permeate “Hurry Up Tomorrow” in both of its formats — in the movie, they betray a narcissism so transparent and malignant that it loses most of its rancour; unlike the film’s boppy musical counterpart, “Hurry Up Tomorrow”’s greatest sin is being boring.

“Abel” has just been dumped by his girlfriend (Riley Keough, featured only as a voice on the phone), who tells him that he deserves to die alone. While a saucer-eyed Ortega treks toward the show in her stolen pickup — Chekhov’s gasoline canister still on-hand — the Weeknd slips in and out of spirals and tantrums, barely kept afloat by his manager-slash-buddy Lee (Barry Keoghan). After watching Abel howl a slew of blubbering obscenities at his ex over the phone, the harried Irish party animal hypes up his self-doubting cash cow, plying the singer with bumps of coke in between affirmations of “I love you, bro.” Abel goes out onstage and almost immediately chokes — an echo of the Weeknd’s own experience losing his voice mid-concert back in 2022 (alluded to on the album’s third track, “I Can’t F—king Sing”).

Reeling from failures both personal and professional, Abel runs headfirst into Ortega’s wayward fangirl in the hallways backstage. She whisks him away from his troubles for a nighttime odyssey in Coney Island — complete with air hockey and electric scooter rides, serenaded by the album’s gooier tracks — that climaxes with Abel playing her a “work in progress,” which reduces her to tears. Night becomes morning, and the next day’s faded lustre curdles into something altogether strange, forever altering the course of this tortured singer’s life and career.

To put it plainly, Tesfaye and Shults are a match made in hell. The Weeknd’s glitzy discography — emceed by that histrionic, and vaguely sinister, trademark falsetto — seems bespoke to a filmmaker who trades in decorative misery. His first three features are grim, overdetermined cavalcades of unpleasantness: “Krisha” (2015) wears down the emotional faculties of a recovering addict over the course of a nightmarish Thanksgiving dinner; “It Comes at Night” (2017) watches a tight-knit ménage psychically splinter while a strange disease ravages the postapocalyptic world outside; and “Waves” (2019) drives a young Black athlete to the breaking point before lingering on the familial damage felt in his wake.

Shults’s films arrived just as A24’s annexation of the indie landscape reached its peak; the studio’s burgeoning house style encouraged patronizing flourish and ostentatious technique, which this savvy — yet exceedingly juvenile — Texan delivered in spades. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (released by Lionsgate), on the other hand, seems almost scientifically engineered to fail on every cinematic level. Aside from its lumbering, arrhythmic flow, the film’s utter lack of stylistic conviction is reflected in the camera’s listless, arbitrary movements. Shults’s formal choices are loud, obtrusive and inept, largely defaulting to woozy, juddering shallow focus and repetitive rotating pans.

Tesfaye also wound up a creative force for an A24 production, only this one sent him, justifiably, to the proverbial doghouse; “The Idol” (made in partnership with HBO) sparked controversies that have long outlasted the series’ five-episode run back in 2023. Tesfaye — both star and executive producer — reportedly overhauled the vision of director Amy Seimetz, enlisting the show’s writer Sam Levinson (“Euphoria”) for extensive reshoots. The resulting project is hideously chauvinistic in both content and context, bleakly reflecting the fetishistic attitudes that shaped it. “The Idol” also features an impossibly bad performance by Tesfaye, whose constipated expressions of charisma and mania were correctly ridiculed online.

He does not fare any better in “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” nor do either of the film’s A-listers; Keoghan hammers the one note he’s been given by the screenplay, and Ortega brings a baffling intensity to a character that never strays far from shallow archetype. Tesfaye and Shults name her “Anima,” a term from Jungian psychology that refers to the feminine part of the male psyche — a handy clue as to why this unstable woman spends the final, “Misery”-inflected stretch of this film obnoxiously analyzing the Weeknd’s greatest hits.

The film’s circuitous narrative takes two agonizing hours to unveil its true colours, with desperate, borrowed abstractions striving to ennoble the flailing creative endeavours of the artist whose subconscious we’re trapped in. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is remarkable in its ceaseless and shameless capacity for failure, constantly finding new and innovative ways to fall flat on its face.