One Night Only sends itself to horny jail — The A.V. Club

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

One Night Only sends itself to horny jail — The A.V. Club | AIPROPX

For much of Will Gluck’s One Night Only , you can accept the goofy rules of this romantic-comedy-meets-political-satire. You can accept the movie’s conceit that the government was now in everybody’s business, mandating who could (married folks) and couldn’t (unmarrieds) have sex. You can forgive Travis Braun’s cloying script alternating between will-they, won’t-they scenarios involving the two leads (a charismatic pairing of Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro). But right at the “decent rom-com” finish line, One Night Only hands its audience a studio note from the Production Code era: Knock out that sex business, it gets in the way of love! The movie’s baffling anti-sex ending contradicts how the government’s restriction of sex drives society to literal horny jail.

In a dystopian future not too dissimilar from ours, there’s only one night each year—from 7 PM to 7 AM––where the unwedded masses get legal permission to fornicate, due to a government mandate that forces people to marry if they want to have sex. That is, unless you’re a part of the LGBTQ community; they apparently figured out how to skip the Sex Purge, but won’t share their secret beyond a cheeky punchline.

For lovestruck pizzamaker Owen (Turner), tonight was also going to be the night he would propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) over omakase, until she suggests sleeping with someone else. In a nice turn from his stoic hunk character in Eternity , Turner plays Owen earnestly, able to pull off a few physical jokes with an unshakeable confidence. Allie (Barbaro), on the other hand, is a chronically single singer with debilitating stage fright. With the help of her lesbian roommate, she’s newly transformed and ready to paint the town red—if only she can find a partner for the night. Barbaro channels a touch of Diane Keaton in her character’s mortification over publicly singing, and she’s a flirtatious foil who can be combative but intrigued by her unlikely match. Owen and Allie bump into each other on the sidewalk, meet-cute style, and start an unlikely romance with many side quests and potential partners in between.

Because of the compressed “one-night in New York” timeframe and the wild crisscrossing throughout the city—they travel the distance from Harlem to Brooklyn Bridge Park at least twice— One Night Only shares some madcap DNA with After Hours , Martin Scorsese’s one-man’s odyssey to get home after a misspent night out with no money. But that’s about as serious as One Night Only gets, even as Owen is robbed by someone posing as a hookup and Allie is lied to by a guy on parole (who doesn’t have the right to have sex and therefore seduces her under false pretenses). Instead, the movie is only committed to its bit of delirious fun, which involves surviving single-mingle events, awkward first conversations, and getting to know each other on the train, all of which feels rooted in the present-day dating landscape.

A director with previous rom-com experience with Easy A , Friends With Benefits , and Anyone But You to his name, Gluck immerses his viewers in Owen and Allie’s mixed-up world with a giddy energy. There’s all kinds of ridiculous PSA signs encouraging the public to tattle on neighbors copulating, or defining what sex acts are acceptable for marrieds and unacceptable for the unwedded. There’s cheesy “fuck the mandate” graffiti throughout the city, timers on cabs and subway cars to keep the pressure on before celibacy returns as the law of the land, and a running bit where the sudden rush for condoms leads to desperate measures. Losing one’s set of rubbers is a way to get arrested on what’s surely the night with the biggest spike in STDs.

But Gluck and Braun stop short of giving their political satire real teeth. The marriage mandate is barely given context, with only a mention of the freaky Christo-fascists trying to impose it on the country (it’s kind of referenced in a fight with overlapping dialogue that’s difficult to hear clearly, so that’s very much on purpose). Becoming an “incel is a badge of honor,” as one smarmy politician puts it in an interview. The film makes a vague comparison to how the city’s behavior changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—with people banging pots and pans to commemorate the sexytime free-for-all—which feels too glib for such a painful memory in New York City’s history. In a real world where wearing masks still involves its own culture war, there’s a pretty big suspension of belief when accepting that in the world of One Night Only , all adults have biometric markers that will report them to Big Brother if they have sex, or inexplicably, if they have sex without protection, a process which is left entirely to the imagination as to how that works.

Braun, whose background is mostly in children’s TV, clearly had a field day imagining this heterosexual hell. But even more concerning than the idea that we landed somewhere closer to the dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale is the lesson the movie comes away with, which is, as one character states plainly, that maybe the fascists are right about limiting sex. It’s a sentiment echoed at the film’s end, driving home the sex-negative point that this perfectly normal function of humanity somehow blocks us from finding true love. We spent an entire runtime watching New York City turned upside-down under ridiculous circumstances for the moral of the story to be “yeah, you should wait.” Does every ticket come with a purity ring?

One Night Only feels like a youth group lecture where the pastor warns of hookup culture on college campuses, a feature-length studio note from an executive afraid the movie won’t go over well in the Bible Belt. One would like to believe there was ...