In recent years, the ‘visual album’ has become a part of many a musician’s album cycle. From Beyoncé’s Lemonade, to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, to Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, those projects tend to be lavish, thematic affairs that largely exist as super-sized album-length music videos. Hurry Up Tomorrow is not that. Sure, the latest album from Canadian mega-star The Weeknd – aka Abel Tesfaye – is also called Hurry Up Tomorrow. But his film of the same name, while linked to the album, isn’t a visual album project – it’s a full-on psychological thriller feature film, directed by Waves’ Trey Edward Shults, in which Tesfaye plays an alternative version of himself.

“It’s kinda like Raging Bull and Persona meets Purple Rain,” explains Shults, who wrote the film alongside Tesfaye and Reza Fahim. The film was inspired, in part, by an incident...