One Night Only is about as high-concept as high concepts get: What if it were The Purge, except it’s a romantic comedy, with sex instead of crime? And what if the tone was about 90 percent rom-com and 10 percent still The Purge?
The gimmick here is that a law has passed in which premarital sex is outlawed, with the exception of one night of the year, which the culture has reoriented to Christmas for horny singles. This is enforced not by a version of Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, but rather via surveillance capitalism.
The plot follows Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro), two single people in New York City who stumble through the big night, one that ends very predictably. Throughout, background characters are in various stages of in flagrante delicto all around them.
The two leads are charming, and they’re outstanding together. The very British Turner is channeling Brothers McMullen-era Edward Burns, while Barbaro (best known as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown) is like a human ray of sunshine, although her job, as a singer for drug-company commercial jingles, isn’t as hilarious as the movie thinks it is.
Director Will Gluck, who a couple of years ago turned Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney’s Anyone But You into a rare theatrical romcom hit, knows his way around the genre, and the film uses New York City well, not making much attempt to hide the influence of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. (And its various “one crazy night” imitators too—like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, One Night Only features a three a.m. visit to a midtown recording studio for a tryst.)
But beyond that, a lot goes wrong. The film is 102 minutes but feels overstuffed. Both characters get multiple side-quests with other potential partners, when it’s clear from the first frame exactly where everything’s going, and most scenes in the movie are about 20 percent longer than they needed to be. The script, by Travis Braun, topped the Black List in 2024, and I could have told you that without looking.
For a romantic comedy, it’s surprisingly unfunny—the humor is too dependent on pratfalls and broad physical comedy—and for a movie about sex, it’s not very sexy. Turner co-starred last year in Eternity, another romantic comedy that was almost entirely overwhelmed by the over-complexity of its gimmick. There are some fun little supporting performances, including Molly Ringwald as Turner’s mom and LeVar Burton as the mom’s boyfriend.
One Night Only doesn’t do enough with the satirical potential of its premise, and I’ve no idea what political coalition might have led to the enactment of a premarital sex ban, especially with the one-night loophole (sex-averse Gen Z libs, teaming up with Tradcaths? The Joe Rogan contingent of the right, I’m guessing, probably would’ve opposed that). We know there’s a resistance to the no-sex regime, and there’s a Covid metaphor in there somewhere, but it’s all undercooked.
I liked a sequence in which it’s established that the sex-once-a-year rule has suddenly made condoms extremely scarce and valuable, much the way Covid led to unexpected small economic disruptions. But the script falls flat.