Nobody is going to say that Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, is not an artistic person. Listening to his music or watching any of his live performances is enough to see the creativity, thought, and passion that he puts into his work. His foray into major motion pictures, Hurry Up Tomorrow, undoubtedly has all the same qualities, and it’s obvious that Tesfaye had a vision he wanted to share with the world. I will not fault him for that. Unfortunately, as a movie, it just does not work. Not at all.

The plot, such as it is, follows a fictional version of Tesfaye as he juggles a world tour and the breakup that is tearing him up. Enabled by the people around him, he buries his pain in drugs and starts to spiral out of control, even losing his voice due to the stress. Enter Anima, played admittedly wonderfully by Jenna Ortega, a fan/stalker whose name kind of gives the whole metaphor away. She’s a runaway drifter that worms her way into Tesfaye’s life at his lowest and the two connect thanks to their shared trauma.

There’s not much more to go into plot-wise without hitting heavy spoilers, but I honestly doubt it would matter. The entire story is more dream-sequence and psychological examination than actual events, and it’s rarely clear what’s real or if any of it is. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. A movie like Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s mind-bending masterpiece, plays with the bounds of reality with great success. Yet, it feels like Hurry Up Tomorrow went for all of the metaphor and none of the entertainment that made Lynch’s film so beloved.

Tesfaye and director Trey Edward Shults fail to inject any life into the narrative as it plods along at a snail’s pace. There are long shots where the camera stares at basically nothing and sequences so drowned in flashing lights that it’s actually hard to look at. Couple that with how loud the background music often is and how mumbled most of the dialogue is, and it’s hard to get a feel for what’s happening at any given time. While I get that dreamlike confusion is the point, I’m of the opinion that a movie shouldn’t be physically difficult to watch.

What’s most disappointing is that I can see what the duo were trying to accomplish. I think there’s a pretty decent movie in there somewhere, and there are a few moments where it peeks out, if only briefly. The third act has quite a bit of promise, it’s as close as I came to being genuinely entertained. However, that’s not enough to justify all the rest of the film’s flaws. Maybe it’s too ambitious, or maybe it’s just not ideal as a movie. Either way, Hurry Up Tomorrow was not a good time at the theater for me, as I kept wishing it would hurry up and end.