The Weeknd's new film Hurry Up Tomorrow is a bizarre vanity project, and completely compelling

Brand management is everything for a pop star. Give the people what they want — the carefully curated relatability of, say, Taylor Swift — and your public will adore you en masse. Let the dark side of your persona out of the cage and you risk alienating the audience that brought you to fame.

While Canadian R&B artist The Weeknd, aka Abel Tesfaye, remains one of the biggest stars on the planet, his media image has taken a hit in recent years. For that he can thank the controversy, however overblown, surrounding his ill-fated HBO venture The Idol (2022) — an unpleasant, vaguely misogynist descent into pop's underworld in which the singer played a warped-mirror version of himself.

If that weren't enough, Tesfaye's latest project seems hell-bent on not only killing The Weeknd off once and for all, but in taking whatever's left of his audience's goodwill down with it.

A companion piece to his recent album of the same name, Hurry Up Tomorrow is one of the ugliest self-portraits in the history of pop star movies, alternately self-loathing and self-pitying, solipsistic and grimly exhilarating.

If you're a scholar of pop stardom, it's also essential — a wild ride into the distorted world view of an artist at the dizzying heights of fame.

It opens in extreme, abstract close-up, with the voice of a distraught ex-lover (Riley Keough) unloading on the star. "You're pathetic," she seethes. "You deserve to end up alone."

We're soon with Tesfaye backstage, the star doing weights and vocal warm-ups as he pumps himself up for a performance, his sweaty, pug-like manager (Barry Keoghan) goading him on at every turn.

It's obvious something's not right, even beyond the romantic dissolution. The singer is wracked with anxiety, paranoia and a fear of losing his voice, and that's before he starts doing bumps of coke and slugging hard liquor straight from the bottle.

But on stage, he's magnetic: an occult priest in black-and-gold robe, arms outstretched as the demonic, 'Thriller'-like keyboards of 'Wake Me Up' electrify the sold-out crowd.

Meanwhile, tearaway teen Anima (Ortega) is busy torching an ex's farmhouse, eyes burning with the intensity of the flames. It seems less a case of whether these two dark forces of dark nature will meet, but when.

Their fateful tryst soon becomes Tesfaye's nightmare — and just maybe, deliverance from the prison of his own making.

Haters will call the film, directed by Trey Edward Shults (It Comes At Night) from a script co-written with Tesfaye, an extended music video and a vanity project, an expensive piece of on-screen therapy that mistakes vulnerability for brazen marketing opportunity.

All of those things are true, of course, and they all contribute to what makes the film so fascinating — to dismiss them is to dismiss the audacity, or sheer delusion, of a major pop artist willing to get so wretched, so messy, and so near the peak of their super-stardom.

"I'm a f***ing legend and you're a nobody," a coked-up Tesfaye screams over the phone to his ex in one moment, before smashing a backstage mirror en route to a stadium-sized meltdown.

In the tradition of pop stars playing thinly disguised versions of themselves on screen — a lineage that includes everyone from The Beatles to Eminem — it sure is a strange way to go about immortalising yourself.

Tesfaye is clearly a student of the genre. In the most obvious sense, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a shot at his very own Purple Rain, the 1984 hit that minted Prince's super-stardom while hinting at that gruesome psyche behind the glamour.

But where Prince's cinema-a-clef offered an exuberant sense of catharsis, The Weeknd's tale of obsessive fandom and karmic consequence seems to be channelling Der Fan, a 1982 German thriller about a deranged stan who — spoiler, I guess? — kidnaps and literally devours the object of her disaffection.

In Hurry Up Tomorrow, it's Ortega's Anima who becomes the stalker, the catalyst for the superstar's breakdown. The movie's portrayal of pop stardom as an empty life of drugs and groupies is as dull as it is sexist, but there's something compelling about the idea that two people who destroy everything they touch might just have a shot at redeeming each other.

Certainly, this may be the first movie in which a major pop star is so thoroughly taunted and tortured with their own hits, as happens in a scene where Ortega goes full Patrick Bateman on the Weeknd's back catalogue.

Dancing to 'Blinding Lights' while her victim squirms, she declares it "an enduring hit". On 'Gasoline', from the singer's less-remembered 2022 album: "I don't want to call it a failure — but what happened?"

To be sure, all of this dour self-deprecation is part of the package for Tesfaye. The film — which essentially doubles down on the nastier concerns of his music — might reasonably be dismissed as a brand-extension exercise no different to those of his sunnier peers.

Pop is performance, after all, and psychosis is just another angle to push your product.

As a document of stardom's raging paranoia, though — and the Devil's bargain that pop music makes with artists and their audience — it's hard not to be transfixed.

Terrorising Tesfaye during the movie's troubling climax, Anima accuses him of breaking hearts and discarding people in order to fuel his art. "How much did you take from them," she snarls, "just to make another pop song?"

Hurry Up Tomorrow might be intended as Tesfaye's rebirth, or even his absolution, but it only serves to complicate his brilliant, sometimes infuriating artistry.