The premise of One Night Only is openly dystopian: In a near-future America where pre- and/or extramarital sex has been outlawed, save for a 12-hour grace period where apparently anything goes, two attractive New Yorkers—Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner)—keep meeting cute. Owen’s been granted uneasy amnesty by his girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), who’s determined to sleep with somebody else based solely on hedonistic principle; Allie’s hoping to meet somebody who cares what she likes in her coffee.
Allie and Owen’s first encounter is a disaster. Still clutching the engagement ring he had been hoping to hand off to Malika over a scuttled sushi dinner, he pukes up some designer cocktails on the sidewalk outside Allie’s apartment. Later, each having located a solid prospect, the duo vie for the privilege of being price-gouged for the last available condom in Manhattan. And so on, through an all-night odyssey that plays like a coed update of After Hours. Gradually, their toxic vibes transubstantiate into something sweeter; he’s a nice guy, and he remembers what she likes in her coffee. They start wondering whether the universe is trying to tell them something they already know.
There’s nothing wrong with romantic comedies stating the obvious, provided their leads have charisma—chemistry is its own form of eloquence. Turner and Barbaro are good together: They’re mutually lithe and likable, a pair of ascending stars without too much baggage from other projects ready and willing to pratfall head over heels. (Barbaro does most of her shtick in impractical stilettos.) There’s something legitimately interesting—and potentially liberating—about screenwriter Travis Braun’s Purge-style setup, which doesn’t so much bypass the typical issues of everyday plausibility as demolish them. The world of One Night Only makes so little sense on any level—as speculative sci-fi or social allegory—that instead of worrying about whether the characters’ jobs or wardrobes or conversations are realistic (like in, say, Celine Song’s Materialists, which was scrutinized down to the square footage), we’re encouraged to simply anticipate and enjoy the shamelessly doled-out genre tropes in a vacuum.
Conventions rendered surreal can be a beautiful thing. “We came together,” says Owen when he and Allie try to crash a high-end warehouse sex party, bringing to mind the sublime, deconstructed Nora Ephrontry of David Wain, a filmmaker whose saving grace is that he’s never really trying to say anything. Director Will Gluck and Braun are going for something more conceptually elevated and provocative than Wain’s latest effort, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, or even recent indie sex comedies like The Invite and I Want Your Sex. One Night Only comes on strong as a cautionary tale of soulless and encroaching corporate enshittification. Everywhere we look, carefully framed ads for real brands—Dunkin’ Donuts, Durex—compete with posters for goofy, fake ones. The city becomes a semiotic collage of dubious euphemisms and doublespeak slogans, scattered with signs of resistance (“Repeal!” cry the rainbow-colored placards placed in windows) and lined with ersatz artworks (a phony Basquiat painting in a fancy apartment becomes a plot point).
With this in mind, we know Owen’s a good guy because he runs the sort of scrappy neighborhood pizza parlor where customers are treated like family; he’s hoping to settle down and start one of his own. Allie’s a singer frustrated by her gig covering Top 40 hits with the lyrics altered to hawk medication and hygiene products. (Vanessa Carlton will hopefully enjoy her royalties.) The bad guys aren’t just the churchgoing bogeymen who’ve hijacked Congress to enforce abstinence but the avatars of anodyne digital living. One of Allie’s first prospective hookups during her night on the town is an obnoxious pharma bro (Nicholas Braun) who boasts about the government-mandated biomedical chips that make this nightmarish parody of cuffing season possible. When Owen decides to turn to the apps to find a partner on demand, he’s lured into the bushes and robbed by a sex worker who apologizes for being on the clock.
There is, potentially, a great, devastating, and erotically charged contemporary satire to be made about the collision of big-tech profits, state surveillance, and the free-floating sexual anxieties of Gen Z—a rom-com with a revolutionary thrust. Or, failing that, we could use another authentically raunchy, R-rated studio release like 2023’s uneven but underrated No Hard Feelings, in which Jennifer Lawrence’s 30-something burnout memorably bellowed, in the midst of a chaste college house party, “Doesn’t anybody fuck anymore?” That’s not exactly a high bar, yet One Night Only fails to clear it; instead, it plunges headlong into the depths. It’s not only one of the more egregiously terrible mainstream American movies in recent memory—a truly mind-boggling viewing experience—but it also depicts how something seemingly calibrated for present-tense resonance can so completely fail to meet its moment. It’s a case study in the gap between intention and execution.
The disparity between the two is an odd common denominator in Gluck’s work. 2010’s Easy A, which cast Emma Stone as a high school version of Hester Prynne, was breezy and funny enough to disguise the bizarre contradiction at its core, which was that the real problem with the slut-shaming of its heroine wasn’t simply that it was misogynistic but that it was inaccurate. “The rumors of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated,” says Stone’s Olive at the outset; the moral that people’s sex lives are their own business even in the age of the internet bumps up against the filmmakers’ decision to scrupulously and conspicuously keep their heroine pure. (Meanwhile, the ostensible feminism of the script was compromised by the girls around Olive being exclusively hypocrites, harridans, or holier-than-thou scolds.)
Both Friends With Benefits and the neo-Shakespearean Anyone but You played self-reflexively with expectations and clichés: The characters seemed somehow aware that they were in romantic comedies and that they were going through the motions accordingly. The combined wattage of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney made Anyone but You a gigantic hit, buoyed by nostalgic (bordering on reactionary) media rhetoric about its knowing evocation of the good old days—i.e., the 1990s. Gluck’s talent, then, was for movies infused with a longing for a better era, when lovers pledged their troths to “Closing Time” and multiplexes were crammed with glossy products. They suggested the way forward was to go back.
On the surface, One Night Only is progressive and defiant, but surfaces are all we get. “It’s been a lot,” reads an opening title card that, by juxtaposing future shock exposition against helicopter shots of the Big Apple, accidentally evokes Escape From New York. (Say what you will about John Carpenter’s social vision, but at least in that film and They Live—another incidental reference point in One Night Only given Gluck’s fixation on the mixed messages of commercial signage—there’s lip service to the idea of resistance.) The thing is, it doesn’t feel like a lot—not even a little bit. The light tone isn’t deceptive or complex; it’s placating, as if teasing us for even considering the questions the movie seems to want credit for raising in the first place.
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Leaving aside the solipsism of filtering this material through an exclusively American lens—What does the Mandate look like to the rest of the world? How does it impact the global economy? Can dissenters flee across the border to sexy Canada? Has the international sex tourism trade boomed?—One Night Only is spectacularly cloistered and incurious about its ensemble. The intriguing, deeply loaded observation by Allie’s lesbian roommate, Arya (Quintessa Swindell), that hookup night is “for the straights” goes completely unexamined, and she disappears from the film as soon as she’s helped Barbaro find a dress. (A few questions: If queer people have found a way around the strictures, are they keeping these strategies to themselves? Is there a work-around for the wrist monitors? YouTube explainers about how to beat their sensors like lie detectors? And so on.) Also unexamined: the possibility that the release of so much pent-up energy might lead to adventurous experimentation for the heterosexual protagonists. We never see either lead checking out or getting checked out by a member of the same sex.
If the point is to imply a populace completely ground down by the yoking of religious fundamentalism to technocratic means of control—with dopamine being a controlled substance—it’s not nearly forceful enough. Meanwhile, the idea that sex might be enjoyable for its own sake—for the characters or the audience—is undermined by the loudly dropped hints that the citywide orgies occurring around the edges of the frame are just meaningless pleasure. Nobody is expecting One Night Only to be Eyes Wide Shut, but it’s not even as funny as Kubrick’s classic, which pivoted on the joke of seeing Tom Cruise fail to get laid. Even a few decent visual or verbal jokes would have gone a long way here; the only place where Gluck shows his talent is in the use of pop music (a strength in all of his films). Barbaro—who was wonderful as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown—warbles Yazoo’s “Only You” at a “Fuck the Mandate” benefit in front of foxy folkie Ezra Stone (Charlie Gillespie), a protest singer who looms as Allie’s most seductive potential no-guitar-strings-attached hookup and an impediment to her inevitable 11th-hour connection with Owen. (Sorry, a movie this craven doesn’t warrant spoiler warnings.)
“Maybe the fascists got this one right,” observes Ezra once he and Allie are alone in a recording studio. He’s being sarcastic, but the film’s skepticism about instant gratification and its compatibility with monogamous commitment—the only kind that matters, apparently—bears him out. Ezra is inevitably revealed at the moment of truth to be a boringly horny asshole, unworthy of Allie, and he’s punished with a broken face as a form of cosmic cockblocking. Julia Fox’s aggressively nymphomaniac party girl, Skye, Owen’s best bet, gets outed as a prude after being scared off by a bit of Bubble Wrap. (Really? Julia Fox? Scandalized by Bubble Wrap?) There are uglier punishments in the mix as well, carefully veiled as crowd-pleasing beats: Hawke’s final scene, where her character admits she didn’t go through with cheating only to be completely discarded by her longtime boyfriend, is startlingly cruel. The finale is, on one level, predictable—which is fine; we don’t go to movies like this for surprises—but also stunning in its embrace of passivity, a capitulation to a status quo that insinuates that one solution to the loss of autonomy is to dance like nobody’s watching. Another is to just bide your time, put a ring on it, and carry on a year later behind closed doors—the final image of a wannabe romp doesn’t even offer up much in the way of nudity. Fusing prudishness to subversion and smugness to sincerity, One Night Only operates precisely and obliviously as the punch line to its own cautionary tale; it feints left and swipes right.