Near the end of Robert Altman’s The Player, Tim Robbins is pitching a script, and his boss interrupts him. “Do they screw?” Everyone’s taken aback for a moment. “The guy and the girl, do they screw?” Robbins smiles, relieved it was this easy. “Yeah, they screw.” The secretary behind his boss just rolls her eyes.
I wonder how many agents, managers, producers, and studio heads looking over scripts today ask, “Do they screw?” The number can’t be zero, but it’s not the top line question anymore, hasn’t been for nearly a decade. Ever since the incredible rise of “the movies” as an idea above and beyond individual films on the boardwalks of Coney Island in the first decade of the 20th century, sex has been a primary concern; forget violence, whose somewhat dubious pleasures have never been seriously challenged, at least in America.
Sex sells, but who’s buying? No one, according to Will Gluck, writer-director of the new rom-sex-com One Night Only (Travis Braun is the only credited screenwriter, but Gluck said in recent interviews that he “rewrote everything.) Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro star as two regular movie people living normal movie lives on a very special movie day: the one day of the year that the United States permits premarital sex. One Night Only takes place in a parallel fascist dystopia where the government has tattooed every adult in the country so they can track if they’re breaking the law and having unmarried sex. On one day of the year, a pressure valve is allowed, and people can screw as much as they want for 12 hours. Why did the government do this? A brief TV interview with some major player in the administration emphasizes family values, while Nicholas Braun has a cameo explaining to Barbaro the particulars of the tattoo scanning system.
All of this sounds horrifying, worse than Her or even Children of Men, yet Gluck is uninterested (or unwilling) in exploring the vast implications of his film’s premise; instead, he tries to turn in another straight down the middle, right between the eyes romcom in the vein of Anyone But You, his previous film and a major sleeper hit in early-2024. The stars of that film, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, appear in photo cameos as potential Tinder dates for both Turner and Barbaro, and I’m sure they’re relieved that’s all they have to do with this sexless sex comedy.
It’s not as if the rom-sex-com hasn’t been successful before: look at 40 Days and 40 Nights, which grossed $95 million and followed Josh Hartnett through 40 days of voluntary celibacy. Unfortunately, too many men today would sail through those 40 days without a problem, but in 2002, this premise was sold as a familiar, even universal, experience, much in the same way Knocked Up was initially advertised, with a dumb, slovenly, wide-eyed Seth Rogen staring out beneath the tagline “WHAT IF THIS GUY GOT YOU PREGNANT?” That premise still holds water, but in 2026, people are having far less casual sex than in 2002; I’m surprised One Night Only got made in the first place.
Still, Gluck is optimistic (or at least he was last week when he talked to Variety): “I learned from my last movie that people are going to discover this and say, ‘Wow, that’s not what I thought it was going to be. You know how the acronym for word-of-mouth is WOM? I’m calling it a WOM-com.” Good luck with that, man. Even if the clunky and disturbing high concept premise of One Night Only were explored further, the movie’s done from the word go because of Turner. Like Josh O’Connor and Timothée Chalamet, Turner is one several prominent young male actors who look like rodents. Whoever’s behind this: it’s not funny, it’s not cute. Callum Turner isn’t a leading man. He’s Henchman #3, or Rapist #4. James Bond? You must be fucking joking. Barbaro is fine, but in such a lifeless and unforgiving mess of a movie, it’s even hard to tell if she’d be any good in the kind of breezy rom-com Hollywood effortlessly churned out in the 1990s.
Where is the love? Gluck doesn’t think the discomfort with sex in movies is limited to young people: “I cut out so much. There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets. I felt we needed to show the world that way. As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie. You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it. So we just kept editing it out until we got a balance, and those comments went away.”
Those above the age of 40 might be baffled by this unprecedented shift, but it’s easy to understand if you think about the rise of high definition pornography on demand in the last 15 years. Extreme hardcore porn, crazier than anything in Cruising, is easier to see than ever. Go ahead and see for yourself. I’ll sit here and think about you looking up Big Black Beauties. And that’s exactly why sex in movies makes people uncomfortable now: it immediately reminds them not just of masturbation, but masturbation and porn. How romantic!
“The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody. Now it’s more of a private, intimate thing that people don’t want to see when they’re in a shared experience. Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a big theater, they get uncomfortable.”
Astute points. Why make the movie then? As it stands, there isn’t a single bit of nudity in all of One Night Only’s 102 minutes, not even a glimpse of nipple. Not that romcoms need nudity, but goddamn, with this premise? It really sounds like something Ari Aster would write, and by avoiding all of the fascinating problems and implications in the script, Gluck has turned in an interesting failure, a movie with more going on than the hugely successful Anyone But You. Like that film, One Night Only takes place in a parallel corporate liberal utopia, where globalism has triumphed, 90 percent of relationships are interracial, and even vague references to politics are comically incoherent. Turner’s ex (Maya Hawke) blames the no-sex mandate on the Democrats (“Thanks, Obama,” while rolling her eyes), and his response is even more confusing: “Obama? This all started like… three years ago.” Okay… so during the Biden administration? Hawke brushes him off: “Yeah, well, you know, the pendulum swings…” What?
I understand that Gluck makes mass entertainments; so will you once you look at his body of work. That’s fine—his movies generally make money. There were similarly vague political comments in Anyone But You, but they weren’t anchored to that film’s premise. No matter how much nudity and sex Gluck cut out of One Night Only, he was always going to end up with a left-handed movie because even the barebones premise of Turner and Barbaro walking around Manhattan looking for a place to have sex is too “out there” for most people today. The movie’s not fascinating, but THAT’S fascinating.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM