‘One Night Only’ Nails Its Satire More Than Its Romance

There’s nothing people love more than feeling smarter than a romantic comedy, so when the trailer for Will Gluck’s One Night Only dropped, the internet leapt at the chance to deride the high-concept premise of a world where there’s only one night a year where single people are legally allowed to have sex. There was such collective agreement the film would be a basic rom-com that did nothing with its “sex purge” setup, Polygon literally ran a piece explaining the rules of the world before the movie was released—as if discovering the details isn’t half the fun of watching a high-concept comedy. As it turns out, however, One Night Only is very much in on its own joke. In fact, it actually works best as a satire about what it’s like to try to live a normal life in an increasingly fascist, tech-controlled surveillance state that’s simultaneously sex-obsessed and sex-starved. Where it stumbles is as a character-driven romance.

As the movie opens, it’s been three years since the conservative American government passed a bill outlawing premarital sex in the hopes of forcing more people into traditional family-oriented marriages. There’s a general agreement that “the mandate” sucks and disbelief that it was passed at all, particularly from other countries gawking at America’s bizarre downfall. But people have also reluctantly accepted this “new normal” to the point where traditions have emerged around a 12-hour period that’s basically New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, and Rumspringa rolled into one. Some longtime couples leap at the chance for experimentation, which is how pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) finds himself unexpectedly single for the night when his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) suggests a brief break to sleep with other people. Meanwhile, dogged romantics like singer Allie (Monica Barbaro) are still determined to find real emotional connection in addition to sex.

Instead of Before Sunrise against a heightened backdrop, though, One Night Only is more akin to “one crazy night” movies like The Night Before, Superbad, and Blockers. Owen and Allie wind up on parallel journeys crisscrossing New York City, discovering new ways people enforce and/or exploit the sex purge. Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun have a lot of fun playing around with increasingly ridiculous ideas about how a world like this might operate—from surge pricing around babysitters and condoms to tech bros looking to capitalize on the implanted biosensors that enforce the sex rules. One Night Only has an R-rated sensibility that evokes the edginess of Judd Apatow’s era-defining mid-aughts rom-coms only in a more absurdist direction, with no shortage of the ironic pop song needledrops that are Gluck’s signature.

Where there are logic gaps in One Night Only, it’s mostly around character motivation. It’s never entirely clear why Allie has chosen tonight to look for a real connection instead of prioritizing that in the weeks and months leading up to the big night. (She shoots off a generic line about how dating is tough any day of the year, but that’s harder to believe when you look like Monica Barbaro.) Meanwhile, Owen’s long-term relationship is too ill-defined to give his arc any real sense of emotional stakes. There’s also something kind of regressive about making the female lead obsessed with love and emotion, while the guy just wants to get some. It’s a conservative streak that carries over into the way this ostensibly sex-positive movie actually handles sex itself. One Night Only is oddly un-horny given its set-up.

Still, what it does have is buckets and buckets of charm, which can get you pretty far in the rom-com genre. Barbaro and Turner are incredibly endearing, charismatic leads, both separately and together. He projects a mix of street-smart confidence and good-guy decency, while she has the daffy effervescence of a screwball heroine. Despite the more traditional gender roles they embody on the page, there’s a welcome sense of equality to their dynamic in practice. Even when One Night Only gets too bogged down in episodic incident, it’s a pleasure to spend time with its two leads and the many, many famous faces Gluck surrounds them with. (The clear scene-stealers in that department are Molly Ringwald as Owen’s mom and LeVar Burton as her boyfriend.)

That alone makes it a massive step up from Gluck’s disastrously unpleasant Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You and back towards some of the juice he found with Easy A and Friends with Benefits in the early 2010s. In fact, One Night Only very much feels like a spiritual sequel to that Justin Timberlake/Mila Kunis vehicle, right down to a climactic moment that isn’t exactly a flash mob but comes close. Knowing Gluck has something that sex-positive in his filmography also helps soften the oddly prudish streak he’s seemingly inadvertently stumbled into here. Having already made a film about sex before love, Gluck is now simply trying to explore whether love can still exist in a world where single people schedule their lives around the one night a year they’re allowed to have sex.

If that’s not exactly a question that feels relevant to the real world, something about the film’s general “we’re living in crazy times” ethos does. (For whatever it’s worth, it also made me think of the rise and fall of massive society-changing mandates like Prohibition in the United States and the Cultural Revolution in China, although I’m not sure that’s exactly what Gluck was going for.) Mostly, though, One Night Only is entertaining in a way that’s both a retro throwback and an innovative surprise. It may not be the type of rom-com that will linger, but as a one-night stand, it hits the spot.

One Night Only opens in theaters on August 7th. Caroline Siede is a film and TV critic who runs the newsletter Girl Culture.