One Night Only Review: This Is Fine?

Technology ruined the romantic comedy. No way would the benign plot complications of the original screwballs fly these days. Crossed wires, missed connections – none of that happens when everybody’s got a phone in their pocket, a Google alert on their name, and seven different kinds of social media accounts. So modern rom-com screenwriters must invent new and ever more outlandish ways to keep a couple apart until the last reel, which is how we arrive at the premise of One Night Only, which the internet has amusingly shorthanded as “The Purge for sex.”

In the film’s absurdly limited explanation, the U.S. government, three years prior, outlawed premarital sex in an act called “The Mandate.” (Something about reinstalling traditional values.) Now unmarrieds get a single hall pass once a year, in which their anti-sex arm trackers are disabled for 12 hours only and they can get all kinds of horned up. Pizza place owner Owen (Callum Turner, Rose of Nevada) originally had romantic plans for the night with his live-in girlfriend (Maya Hawke), only she’s decided what’s best for their relationship is to explore other options; get out of his “box,” she says. (This box is mentioned several times, but is never expounded upon.) Separately, single gal Allie (A Complete Unknown breakout Monica Barbaro) heads out into the night grimly determined – eager to find a sexual partner, but longing for a soulful connection, too. If you’re wondering what her “thing” is, she’s a prescription drug jingle singer – think: Sara Bareilles ditties retooled to extol plaque psoriasis treatment – who has crippling stage fright (well, until she doesn’t). Strangers at film’s beginning, Owen and Allie cross paths, butt heads, then join forces as they search the five boroughs for someone to boink before time runs out and it’s abstinence o’clock again.

Director Will Gluck is perfectly at home with an R-rated sex comedy with a PG-rated emotional range, as evidenced in his 2023 not-good-but-hugely-popular Anyone but You and the zingier Friends With Benefits (controversial take: the stronger contender in the Kunis/Kutcher Fuckbuddy Movie Bout of 2011), and there’s a buzziness to his depiction of the city at night. Travis Braun’s screenplay provides an excuse to roam said city, especially when Owen and Allie search high and low for the last available condom in New York, reminding me in bursts of the one-crazy-night-on-a-quest energy of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist ... 

Only that film benefited from a source novel, textured lead characters, and memorable supporting players and antagonists. One Night Only’s characterizations are insubstantial to the point of feeling scribbled on the back of a takeout menu. The actors heroically carry the picture on sheer charisma: Barbaro especially is a treat, managing to project both cute and stunning at the same time, a neat trick, while Turner is an amiable dope, all Dad Humor only jacked like he stopped over en route to a superhero role. There are also a surprising number of cameos; LeVar Burton in a tiny part and even tinier tank top is a triumph of minimum time yielding maximum reward.

There are laughs. There is romance. But I resisted the movie, almost from frame one, and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized how unsettled it left me. There’s evidence that Braun’s script, a Black List favorite, had at some point a more ambitious and edgy take on its provocative premise, and there’s burblings of resistance to the insane government overreach speckled throughout, like the “Fuck the Mandate” graffiti that backdrops many scenes. But its internal logic confounded me, and its political message eluded me. Maybe if we didn’t already exist in a reality where women’s and trans people’s bodies are being controlled by the government, where we’re all being surveilled all the damn time, and where the president presents yet another lesson in doublethink every time he logs on for another 2am Truth Social post, there’d be more entertainment value in this ostensibly far-fetched premise.

But that’s not the world we live in, and One Night Only isn’t a romantic comedy. It’s a dystopian horror.

One Night Only

2026, R, 102 min. Directed by Will Gluck. Starring Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner, Maya Hawke, Julia Fox, King Princess, Ziwe, Ben Marshall, Ella Loudon, Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton.

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

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