‘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.
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…
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.
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Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Jenna Ortega Is Not Asking Permission
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Had it been up to Jenna Ortega, she would have spent the summer after Wednesday's debut season chilling on an Icelandic farm—learning to fish, making dinner, helping care for the spring lambs. She hatched this pastoral escape plan online, on a rural work-exchange site, soon after the show became a global hit in late 2022. 'I was so stunned that I didn't really process it,' Ortega says of her overnight megafame. 'I still haven't.' She'd been acting for a decade, but this was a new level. It was so overwhelming, it felt like it was happening to someone else and so unnatural that it was something human beings weren't designed to go through. 'We used to live in villages and meet maybe 300 people in our lifetimes, and now we can travel all over the world and meet way too many people, and way too many people can be familiar with you.' She tried different things to reduce her exposure. She bought a flip phone. ('I had a really hard time with social media,' she says. 'It was really turning me off.') She booked the farm stay and planned to travel on her own after that. But then Tim Burton asked her to do Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and she spent the summer shooting in London instead. Ortega is telling me this over iced teas on the patio of a popular cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., where we're meeting an hour later than planned. Earlier, she'd been trying to humanely evict a wasp's nest from her balcony and locked herself out of her apartment in the process. A friend came over with spare keys, but they were the wrong ones—so she shimmied down a nearby palm tree to freedom. ('Mercury retrograde,' she says. She doesn't believe in it, but she also concedes that it explains a lot.) Ortega is in town to promote Alex Scharfman's horror comedy Death of a Unicorn, with Paul Rudd, in which she plays the surly teen daughter of the lawyer for an evil pharmaceutical family, and Trey Edward Shults's experimental drama Hurry Up Tomorrow, with Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd, in which she plays 'the feminine part of Abel's brain.' She recently got back from Paris, where she shot Cathy Yan's comedy thriller The Gallerist, about an art dealer, played by Natalie Portman, who tries to sell a corpse at Art Basel. (Ortega plays her high-strung assistant.) Last year, she filmed Taika Waititi's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun in New Zealand, then headed to Dublin afterward to shoot the long-awaited second season of Wednesday, which premieres in August. Tomorrow, she leaves for London to begin work on J.J. Abrams's new film, a project so deeply under wraps that the script was transmitted to her under fake names via different accounts. Nonstop work schedule and wasp's nest notwithstanding, Ortega looks calm and unruffled. She's dressed comfortably in a white tank top, plaid jacket, thrifted jeans, and Thom Browne loafers. In person, she's warm, thoughtful, and down-to-earth, almost preternaturally composed for a 22-year-old who has struggled with anxiety, to the point that she once chewed through her Invisalign from grinding her teeth at night. Between her freckles and self-possession, her tiny stature and intelligent eyes, she looks simultaneously very young and wise beyond her years. She radiates the quiet confidence of someone who's no longer asking permission to be herself. 'I was always very existential as a kid,' says Ortega. 'The world was always ending. I was worrying about things way earlier than I needed to.' Disappearing into characters offered an escape from the pressure she put on herself. 'My work felt like the safe place. When I wasn't on set, I had a really, really hard time.' She remembers her teen years being 'full of tension and fear.' She was terrified of messing up. When she sees old videos of the happy, bubbly kid she was on TV, 'I can see clearly that something is wrong, because she doesn't want to say or do the wrong thing.' For a moment, after Wednesday blew up, a familiar narrative seemed to coalesce around Ortega—the kind reserved for young women who stick up for themselves and don't calibrate their words for public consumption. She felt 'incredibly misunderstood.' She gets that the internet rewards controversy, but she tries not to pay attention. 'I feel like being a bully is very popular right now,' she says. 'Having been on the wrong side of the rumor mill was incredibly eye-opening.' It's easy to hide on social media, which makes it even easier to say hurtful things. 'We're incredibly desensitized and disconnected from real interaction,' Ortega says. 'I mean, God, if you could speak to everybody like Wednesday—just say what you truly mean—it would be amazing!' In real life, most people try not to upset other people. Nobody wants to let anyone down. But Wednesday isn't burdened by any of that. 'She doesn't care,' Ortega says. 'It's pretty funny, when you think about it. She's an outsider, but now she's on these mugs, cereal boxes, and T-shirts. You're just thinking, Oh, man, she would hate this!' Ortega—who grew up in the Coachella Valley, the fourth of six siblings—booked her first acting job when she was nine. But it wasn't until recently that she started to feel a sense of control over her life and career. From the beginning, she chafed at being told what she could and couldn't do. She always knew that films were what she wanted, but because she was doing well in commercials and TV, she felt pressured to 'stay in that lane.' One of the pitfalls of being a child star, especially one shaped by the Disney Channel machine—at 13, Ortega was cast as Harley Diaz, the middle child in Stuck in the Middle—is that professionalism is often mistaken for maturity. Looking back, she can see how much she didn't understand, but thought she did, because of how she was treated. 'There are certain things that you're only going to learn from experience,' she says. 'It's hard for me to accept that people didn't respect that more.' In recent years, Ortega has befriended other actresses who survived the treacherous transition from child star to A-list actress—people like Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, and Natasha Lyonne. 'It's been so beneficial and so cozy,' she says. 'They've seen it all, and, honestly, during a much darker time in Hollywood. We've all got this jaded way about us that I don't think we'd have if we hadn't started so young and had so many brutal realizations and experiences.' She pauses, then deadpans, 'But they turned out all right.' On the phone a few days later, Portman tells me that she and Ortega discovered on the set that they both like to crouch in between scenes. 'We don't sit in a chair; we just kind of squat in the corner,' she tells me. 'Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was also a child actress, said she did it too—that it's a way of grounding yourself. There'd be all these chairs, but we'd just squat and look at each other and be like, 'Wow, this is weird.' ' Portman agrees that child actors are often treated like tiny adults. But with her and Ortega, there is also the matter of their size. 'We're both physically tiny, so people will often treat you like a child forever,' she says. 'I'm 43 now, and people kind of pat me on the head. I don't look like a child, but I often feel like I'm treated like a kid. Child actors often cultivate a serious persona because otherwise they'll get treated like kids forever. When you start working as a kid, you kind of always feel like a kid in the workplace. Having some of that seriousness helps remind people, 'I'm a grown-up.' ' Ortega believes wisdom isn't something that is automatically conferred with age. 'It really irks me when people say, 'Oh, you don't understand. You're so young.' Because if you're not open to the experiences that you're having and you're not willing to learn from your mistakes or reflect on your decisions, you're not going to grow at all. You're choosing to be a bystander.' When Wednesday first came along, Ortega hesitated. She'd spent five seasons as young Jane on the CW's Jane the Virgin and three on Disney's Stuck in the Middle. Eager for a change, she lobbied for a role in the second season of Netflix's psychological thriller You—and got it. In 2022, Ortega starred as Tara Carpenter in Scream, the first in a string of horror films—Studio 666, X, and American Carnage—that showcased her dry, acerbic exterior over her vulnerable core and earned her a solid reputation as her generation's scream queen. 'I was getting to this point in my career where I was doing movies and getting in the rooms,' she says. She knew that starring in a show would prevent her from taking on more films. 'So I kept telling everyone no. I almost didn't want to hear what Tim [Burton] had to say, and really like it, and feel like I needed to do it—which is kind of what happened.' Ortega was in New Zealand shooting X when she met with Burton over Zoom. She was wearing a prosthetic—her character's head had just been blown off—but Burton didn't even acknowledge it. One of the scenes she did for him involved catching Thing spying on her and threatening to lock him in a drawer forever. She'd been up for 24 hours and was supposed to go to sleep, but instead she went into her bathroom and filmed a second take. 'I didn't want Tim to have that be his last impression of me,' she says. 'The next day, I was killing time in my hotel room and I found myself thinking about her—like, maybe she moves like this. And then I realized, Oh, man, I think I'm stuck, because I really love this girl.' Burton would go on to direct half of the first season and half of the second of Wednesday.'When I read this thing, I went, like, Oh my God, this is written for a 16-year-old girl, but I can relate. People have said I act like that sometimes,' Burton tells me over the phone from London. 'But it all hinged upon finding somebody to play Wednesday. It had to be somebody who just had it in her soul, and when we saw Jenna, there was just no question.' Ortega was 18 when production began on the first season of Wednesday. She was on her own in a foreign country (the first season taped in Romania), feeling lost and confused. 'In TV, everything moves fast. They're writing scripts, and you're shooting episodes; everything's mixed around. It's very easy to feel like a puppet. You just feel very vulnerable,' she says. 'I've been a series regular for multiple shows. I know what it's like to feel in the dark as an actor.' At times, she's felt like she couldn't speak up if she was uncomfortable: 'I didn't really have a place.' Burton, however, welcomed her input. 'She's playing the character, and I always felt her instincts were right,' he tells me. He went on to cast Ortega as Astrid Deetz, Lydia's (Ryder) teenage daughter in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.'When I first met Winona, I had such a strong feeling about her,' he says. 'I had a similar reaction when I first met Jenna. They both have an internal strength that you can't put into words.' Ortega wasn't in a great place after the first season of Wednesday. 'To be quite frank, after the show and trying to figure everything out, I was an unhappy person,' she admits. 'After the pressure, the attention—as somebody who's quite introverted, that was so intense and so scary.' But things are different now. She's a producer on the show, which felt like a natural progression. 'I sit in on meetings and listen and learn,' she says. 'I'm still finding my footing in that area.' She also tries to make sure other young cast members feel heard. 'Season 2 is bigger, bolder, gorier, and a bit darker,' she says. 'It's sillier in the best way possible.' The show's move from Bucharest to Dublin may have influenced the shift as well, at least for her. 'Dublin was incredible,' she says. 'I loved everything about that experience, the cast, the crew. It was so sweet and so awesome. That island is so beautiful.' On days when they weren't filming, Ortega explored Ireland with her hair and makeup artist, Nirvana, and her assistant, Lizzie. 'On weekends, we'd go down to Kerry and Cork and Donegal and swim in thunderstorms,' she says. Normally, when traveling for work, she would find her café and her bookshop and that was that. But her friends pushed her to get out more. 'I spent a lot of time laying in fields, going on hikes with my dog. I was raising chinchillas, and I'd read books with my chinchillas in my lap. Maybe I'd go to a karaoke bar one night or host a dinner at my place—things like that. I tried to make it feel as family-like as possible.' There are ways in which Wednesday has felt like a double-edged sword for Ortega. The role rubbed off on her in good ways. 'I definitely feel like I have a bit more Gothic taste than I did when I was a teenager,' she says. 'I've always been into dark things or been fascinated by them, but I was a Disney kid, and the whole thing is being bubbly and kind and overly sweet.' She plays the cello now—as well as the synth. She knows how to fence. But if Wednesday helped change people's perception, Ortega once again finds herself in a tricky spot in her career: 'I'm doing a show I'm going to be doing for years where I play a schoolgirl,' she says. 'But I'm also a young woman.' When I check in with Ortega a week later over Zoom, I relay Portman's sympathetic frustrations over being a child star who grew into a not-so-tall adult star. 'I relate to that so immensely, and it's always been really annoying, because you just don't feel like you're being taken seriously,' she says. 'You know, it's like how you're dressed in the schoolgirl costume. … There's just something about it that's very patronizing. Also, when you're short, people are already physically looking down on you.' Boys get away with more. 'But girls,' she says, 'if they don't stay as this perfect image of how they were first introduced to you, then it's 'Ah, something's wrong. She's changed. She sold her soul.' But you're watching these women at the most pivotal times in their lives; they're experimenting because that's what you do.' Sometimes that's about throwing yourself into a new role and giving yourself another chance to stretch and subvert expectations. For Ortega, that comes with another chance to dive into research and watch movies, which is one of her favorite things to do. (While preparing for her role as a robot in Waititi's adaptation of Klara and the Sun, Ortega studied Buster Keaton's films. 'If I'm only paying attention to what's coming out now, then everyone's getting their inspiration from the same place,' she says.) Sometimes that's about escaping—to a farm in Iceland (one day) or an animal sanctuary in Ireland. Sometimes, it's just about caring for something else. Which brings us back to the chinchillas. Because, what? When I ask Ortega about them, she launches into a story. 'I'd always wanted to pet a cow,' she says. Her eyes are wide and animated, and she seems in high spirits. She tells me how Nirvana and Lizzie surprised her with a visit to an animal sanctuary. 'I got to spend the day with cows, and I was thrilled,' she says. Then Eddie, the guy in charge of the sanctuary, introduced her to a family of neglected chinchillas in need of care. 'They had these bald patches,' she says. 'They were clearly struggling—just going through a really rough time. Eddie asked us if we wanted to hold them, and that's a very dangerous position to put a young woman in, because you give her a small furry animal, she will take it home with her.' Ortega returned to the sanctuary the next day to pick up the family of chinchillas: a mother and two sons. 'Like, baby baby. Sons that were smaller than my palm,' she says. 'And I watched them grow into men.' The mother's name was Alma, 'a traditional, beautiful name from The Phantom Thread. There was a brother, Domhnall—which, you know, Irish name, had to do it, I was in Ireland. And the youngest one, kind of the favorite among castmates, was Basil. He was named after Basil Gogos, who was Tim Burton's favorite illustrator as a kid.' (Gogos was famed for his renderings of horror-movie characters for Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.) 'It was so exciting,' she says of caring for them. 'Their hair grew back. They took dust baths. I gave them a little swing.' They returned to the sanctuary when filming was over, but she did come home with a dog. 'She was the runt of her litter and had something weird going on with her eye. Apparently she was sick all the time. I was like, 'Don't worry, guys, I will take care of this dog.' No one asked, but she automatically became our mascot. I guess I just really like nursing things.' It's easy to forget, especially when a character becomes a cultural touchstone so quickly, like Wednesday did, that Ortega is a 22-year-old trying to figure out who she wants to be in the world (and not, you know, Wednesday Addams). 'What's so strange about a character like Wednesday is that Wednesday is an outcast and an outsider—but she's also a pop-culture icon,' says Ortega. 'So, in a strange way, I feel like I've become a pop actor—if that makes sense. And that's something I never saw for myself.' Taking on so many other films in a row allowed Ortega to 'feel like an actor again.' When she's not working, which these days is rare, Ortega is trying on different hats, different modes of creative expression ('I just tried painting a couple days ago; that was exciting and really scary'), and new ways of coping with the stress and anxiety of all of it. 'I've gotten into Transcendental Meditation, which is usually how I like to start my morning,' she says. 'I think I maybe handle my stress better, or I'm really indecisive, so maybe I'm just putting less pressure on those things.' 'I'm very grateful for my audience, ' Ortega says. 'And I want to be able to give back to them. But I also want to do things that are creatively fulfilling to me. So it's finding that balance of doing movies that they might be interested in and then doing movies that I'm interested in.' Right now, she's looking forward to roles that are 'older and bolder and different,' she says. 'And then I want to be able to line up all of my girls and see something different in all of them.' Hair: Ward; makeup: Dick Page; manicure: Yoko Sakakura for OPI; production: One Thirty-Eight Productions; set design: BG Porter You Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
Forbes
3 days ago
- Forbes
The Weeknd And Jenna Ortega's ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow' New On Streaming This Week
Jenna Ortega in "Hurry Up Tomorrow." Hurry Up Tomorrow — a psychological thriller starring 'The Weeknd,' aka Abel Tesfaye, and Jenna Ortega — is reportedly coming to digital streaming this week. Hurry Up Tomorrow is part of a three-pronged project from The Weeknd that also includes the release of a new album and concert tour. Hurry Up Tomorrow was released in theaters on May 16 in conjunction with the start of the artist's concert tour. The official summary for Hurry Up Tomorrow reads, 'A musician plagued by insomnia is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence.' The Weeknd stars as Abel, who is a fictionalized version of himself, while Ortega plays the stranger, Anima, and Barry Keoghan plays Abel's manager, Lee. The Weeknd co-wrote the screenplay with Reza Fahim and director Trey Edward Shults. Per a report by streaming tracker When to Stream, Hurry Up Tomorrow will be released on Friday, June 6, on digital streaming via premium video on demand. While When to Stream is typically accurate with its PVOD reports, it noted that the distributor of Hurry Up Tomorrow, Lionsgate, has not announced or confirmed the release and it is subject to change. Hurry Up Tomorrow is currently available for pre-order on Prime Video for $24.99, which is also the film's digital purchase price. Since digital rentals are generally $5 less than purchase prices, viewers can expect to rent Hurry Up Tomorrow for $19.99 for 48 hours. In addition to Prime Video, Hurry Up Tomorrow will be available on a variety of digital platforms including Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube. While Hurry Up Tomorrow star Jenna Ortega admitted in a February interview with Entertainment Weekly that she initially didn't feel right for the role of Anima, she came to realize 'through conversation and built trust with Trey and Abel, it felt like a team and vision I wanted to work with." The Wednesday star described for EW that Hurry Up Tomorrow is an "experimental telling of what it means to be an artist who is changing, evolving, managing their past while trying not to fear the unknown. What a mental block can do to one's sense of self." Speaking specifically about her character in Hurry Up Tomorrow, Ortega told EW, 'It was my understanding while shooting that my character, Anima, is a version of Abel. A side of him that the persona the Weeknd doesn't show as much … There were many iterations of Ani as the new script drafts came in, but I just loved that she consistently took no s--- and felt everything intensely." Rated R, Hurry Up Tomorrow, starring The Weeknd, Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, is expected to arrive on PVOD on Friday.
Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
The Weeknd brings ‘After Hours Til Dawn' back to Soldier Field, closing a chapter on the bad boy you can dance to
Three years ago, Abel Tesfaye — better known as The Weeknd — first brought his 'After Hours Til Dawn Tour' to Soldier Field. An acclaimed spectacle, the tour that started on such a high eventually brought the artist to his lowest low. In September 2022, during a show at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles near the end of his tour's North American leg, The Weeknd abruptly lost his voice while performing 'Can't Feel My Face.' The incident, brought on by 'self-imposed pressure' and stress, he said, left the artist reckoning with the realities of the world he'd built since breaking out of his underground, internet anonymity into global superstardom. It inspired a complete overhaul of his latest album, 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' (released Jan. 31), as well as a companion film of the same title, with actors Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan co-starring alongside Tesfaye in what's been widely regarded as a hyper-stylized, hollow vanity project. Upon the album and film's releases, Tesfaye announced he'd be leaving his famed moniker behind. He felt he had 'said everything he could say' under the Weeknd name and was looking to explore different creative avenues musically. Despite the critical reception for his ventures outside of music, fans showed up in droves Friday night for the first of two nights of the 'After Hours Til Dawn Tour' (part deux), and to say goodbye (sort of). After opening sets from Mike Dean and Playboi Carti, the lights went down and a deep, crimson haze eclipsed the stage. Brooding and slightly ominous, it was a similar production to what graced the lakefront stadium in the summer of 2022, with a mainstage rising from a city of ruins, multiple runways and a towering, chrome Stargirl replacing what had been the moon. Tesfaye wasted no time getting right into the thick of it. Flanked by nearly three dozen shrouded and masked dancers, one of R&B's most enigmatic figures appeared as a glam Darth Vader or space-age Phantom of the Opera — ready to lead his followers through a celebration of excess, contradiction and dissociation like no one else can. Lyrically, The Weeknd's signature is oscillating between yearning lover boy and the worst guy you'd meet at the afters, set to a breakbeat pace. His career, both on the mic and on film ('Uncut Gems,' 'The Idol'), is built upon various layers and dynamics of who is ultimately the same person: himself. A hedonist hustler never satisfied. The predator and the prey. Secure in his insecurities and wreaking havoc because of it. As one concertgoer shared in passing, 'His music does remind you of a bad boyfriend, but when they make you like them again.' Is it survival mode? Maybe. For over the past decade, it has worked — making Tesfaye a cultural force. Adeptly walking the ever-thinning line between sexy and sleazy, he's undeniably one of modern pop music's most influential hitmakers and collaborators. For Stephanie Escobedo, longtime fan and owner of Through the Body Dance & Fitness Studio in West Town, the artist's latest album and film project heightened the anticipation ahead of this weekend's shows. 'It's visually beautiful, like a giant music video,' Escobedo said of the movie. 'I liked the imagery and how he played himself because he can't act for (expletive). I thought it was a cool omission of how awful of a person he was and how he used the two characters of Jenna and Barry to portray sides of himself. 'From what I understand,' she continued, 'he's going to step away from The Weeknd persona and just go by Abel. I'm interested to hear how Abel sounds, as opposed to this version of him I've loved since 2011.' For just over two hours, there were no breaks in the concert. Tesfaye delivered wall-to-wall vocals, showcasing a strength, clarity, and control over an instrument you'd never think once escaped him. 'It's been a long time since I've been in Chicago,' he recounted during the show. 'Last time I was here, I said I'd play two nights — and look what you did!' Telling his audience that Soldier Field would have to drag him off the stage, he promised to go all night. With a 40-song setlist that included Playboi Carti joining him for 'Timeless' and Carti's own 'Rather Lie,' deep hits 'Wicked Games,' 'The Morning,' and the title track from his debut project 'House of Balloons' (2011), as well as now-expected classics such as 'The Hills,' 'I Feel It Coming,' 'Die For You,' and 'Save Your Tears,' Tesfaye basked in the glory of soundtracking a generation of situation-ships and manipulative love-bombing-you-can-dance-to. But really, you cannot help but dance to it. Try not to be physically moved by the pulsating rush of the synths driving 'Blinding Lights' or throbbing bass behind 'São Paulo.' And sure, the 'ballad' portions of the evening piled on the slightly indulgent vocal runs and pleas from Tesfaye to hear someone say they love him (so committed, you do genuinely believe he needs to hear it) were eye roll-inducing, but expect nothing less from a man who set up the stage visual for 'Call Out My Name' to ultimately look like a sacrificial sermon. If you're not here for a little bit of artistic narcissism from The Weeknd, what are you even doing? Alesa Vera, who was invited last minute by her cousin, said she appreciated that the artist ran straight through his set without any intermissions, costume changes, or exaggerated encore, giving everyone the most for their money. 'He really has so many hits. He sounded fantastic,' she shared after the show. 'That's hard to do. You forget how much you love certain songs. I was engaged the entire time.' As flames, fireworks, and synchronized, light-up bracelets decorated Soldier Field, The Weeknd wrapped his triumphant return by introducing himself as Abel Tesfaye. Whether a death or a rebirth, his performance was proof that no matter the perceived 'failures' he's endured — the music, the talent speaks for itself. For attendees Dre Holland and Amari White, however, The Weeknd will always be The Weeknd. 'The songs, he can't separate himself from those. People will always want to hear The Weeknd' Holland said while leaving Museum Campus. 'How much of his style can really change? I don't think he'll do it, but we'll see.' 'The fans are with him no matter what,' White added. 'He's captured something with his music and lyrics that only he does. I mean, look at all these people here.'
