One Night Only review – sex is legal for 12 hours a year in bizarre romcom

3 hours ago 18

Going into a romcom, there are always the same questions. Will there be genuine chemistry? Will the rom and the com be equal in parts? And, for the last decade and change, will this be the one that finally resurrects a genre long past its prime? But for Universal’s glossy late summer offering One Night Only, notably the first wide-releasing romcom since April, there are more probing questions than usual. The film is the ungainly result of a four-cocktails-in elevator pitch which imagines a world where single people are only legally allowed to have sex on one night of the year, an idea that has seen it been referred to as “Sex Purge”.

On paper, it’s the set-up for a grim Handmaid’s Tale-adjacent horror of a totalitarian state insisting extreme control over the body, but instead it’s used as the backdrop for a sunny meet-cute, screams of protest drowned out by a zippy Top 40 soundtrack. One sits down wondering not just if boy will end up with girl but also how the government would be able to enforce such tyranny and what horrifying punishments lay in store for those willing to pick personal freedom over state-mandated abstinence. If it sounds like far too much for a breezy summer romp to take on, then that’s because it most definitely is, an overstuffed yet undercooked soufflé that can’t quite, ahem, rise to the occasion …

Introductory text informs us, much to the baffled laughter of those at my screening, that “premarital sex has been outlawed in the US” and is now only legal for 12 hours on one night of the year. It’s a “government decreed sexual climate” where it’s now a “badge of honour” to be an incel, the result of what’s described as an “ideological grenade” thrown at Americans by Congress. People have been fitted with biosensors, which detect the chemicals released during sex, and they turn from red to green when one gets married or the sex purge begins, a night of debauchery and chaos as everyone desperately tries to find someone to couple up with (wouldn’t the other 364 days a year be used to plan this a little better?). Protection is mandatory (condom surge pricing goes all the way up to $2,000 apiece) and we’re briefly shown that the price to pay for breaking the law is severe (a poor older man is dragged into a police station for the crime of being horny).

New York City is where we spend that time, the natural setting for a film about both singledom and sex, and we follow the routes of Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (recent Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro) as they hunt for sex against a ticking clock. Owen had a plan with his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) but she chooses the night as an opportunity to hook up with a neighbour, while Allie is urged by her queer roommate, who calls it a night “for the straights”, to put on a revealing dress and get herself out there. Their paths intertwine and for reasons that never quite make sense, decide not to have sex with each other, and instead play wingman from Manhattan to Brooklyn and back again.

After the unforgivably unreal use of Glasgow as a junky replacement for New York in last week’s Spider-Man sequel (it often looked like it was set in a Broadway musical), one of the film’s biggest aces is its up-close and immersive on-location shooting. Director Will Gluck is a savvy commercial film-maker and there’s a bright and poppy slickness to how his film looks and moves, especially when compared with Netflix’s many murkily flat romcoms. But as with his last film, the surprise smash Anyone But You, he’s mastered the sleek aesthetic of a 2000s throwback but not much else. His leads here are a merciful improvement (Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell were among the most criminally vacant pairings we’ve ever seen in the genre), but again there’s not enough smart or specific writing, from kids’ TV writer Travis Braun, to justify why they wouldn’t just head to bed on first meet (yes, he’s vomited up two omakases near her feet but also, it’s sex purge night, guys!).

It’s less romcom and more an attempt to be a raunchy (if ultimately rather coy) sex caper as we go from scrape to scrape, involving ineffective and unfunny cameos (Julia Fox! Pete Davidson! Molly Ringwald! Nicholas Braun! Roma Maffia!) and a string of almost-shags. There’s a gimmicky, ADHD quality to the film and its many misfiring pop culture references, as if made to insist a gen Z audience away from their phones, and while I appreciated how this applied detail to the grabby production design (most scenes involve some sort of visual clue as to how the law has affected the day-to-day), it also felt like a distraction, a script made up of moments rather than a fully realised story. There’s no thought-through journey for our characters (he needs to plan less and she needs to sing more or something?) and while the attractively paired Turner and Barbaro are just about sturdy enough to convince us of the motions, their ho-hum banter is mostly too perfunctory to provoke us into caring about how they end up.

It might not surprise you where the story takes them but what did surprise me is how progressively sex-negative the film becomes, either ridiculing those who want it or applying a moral superiority to those who don’t.

There’s both too much yet not enough world-building here, enough questions answered to encourage us to ask 10 more (why does no one mention masturbation and wouldn’t that also trigger the biosensors?). It’s also just too unavoidably grim of a premise, especially at a dark political moment such as this, for us to ignore the ramifications or root for characters who aren’t trying to actively destroy such a barbaric system (what if Katniss just had fun during those Hunger Games?). Instead, One Night Only weirdly plays like lulling government propaganda, a film about sex purge to be released in time for sex purge that says that actually maybe sex purge is a good idea after all.