The Weeknd is kind of freaking out in first Hurry Up Tomorrow trailer

The Weeknd has long been promising to kill off his musical persona, but it seems like his feature film will be the final nail in the coffin. The Hurry Up Tomorrow trailer foreshadows the artist's death with the subtlety of a Max Martin-produced pop song. Making a whole movie is a massive undertaking just to retire a moniker, but director Trey Edward Shults promised that when audiences check out the film on May 16, "for his fans and people who want to approach it at that level, I hope it's very satisfying and you get a good meal out of it. And for people that aren't his fans and don't know anything about him or even care about the final capping of the Weeknd, I think you still have a great movie to go through."

As Lionsgate previously shared, film follows "[a] musician plagued by insomnia" who "is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence." That musician is more or less the actual Weeknd, a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye, and the stranger is a girl named Anima, played by Jenna Ortega. In the Hurry Up Tomorrow trailer, she appears to be a fan who may or may not be pulling a Misery on the pop star. But in conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Ortega teased, "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."



Tesfaye spends the Hurry Up Tomorrow trailer in various states of distress, and not just when Ortega has him tied to the bedposts. The movie is reportedly inspired by Tesfaye's experience of losing his voice mid-performance, a psychological episode that seems to have influenced his desire to put the Weeknd persona to bed. But though the film may be one big metaphor for evolving into a new chapter, he's still the same artist at his core. At least that seems to be the message of the trailer's eerie voiceover: "Death is nothing at all. It does not kill. Everything remains exactly how it was. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name… Abel."