In the past month or so, something has been happening with movie trailers: They’re making me want to go see movies again. Whether actually seeing those movies is in my own best interest is a more complex story, but recently, a handful of trailers have stopped me in my tracks and made me ask things like: “OK, but what does that wicker dick do?,” “Did I miss that Chris Hansen was that blond and unhinged?,” and “Does this rom-com take place under a totalitarian government regime?” Over the past decade, since the majority of movies began spawning from established IP and franchise juggernauts, trailers have been widely criticized for laying out the entire plots of the movies they were supposed to be teasing. But before that time, trailers did things like build curiosity—and one recent example made me desperate for more information as it played ahead of my other moviegoing experiences, during my social media scrolls, and eventually, in my nightmares. One Night Only’s trailer begins with a premise I’d simply never considered before: “Finding love is hard—try doing it when single people are only allowed to have sex one night of the year.”
First of all: No, thank you! Second, this was the only non–Ben Affleck entity I’ve ever seen have Dunkin’ Donuts product placement in the trailer. After those initial thoughts, though, came a mental labyrinth of questions. Why would the romantic challenge of this rom-com be that it takes place on the one night of the year when single people are legally allowed to have sex—which is not so much a “misunderstanding” or a “race to open one’s heart up in time to let love in” as it is … creating an entirely new world of systems and ideologies under which our two protagonists are now tasked with falling in love? (Listen, many of my favorite rom-coms are based on high-concept premises that create unique stakes for their beloved characters, but this goes a little beyond Kat Stratford needing to date before her younger sister can, or Andie and Ben’s secretly opposing 10-day love schemes.)
Why—and more importantly, how—did writer Travis Braun and director Will Gluck plan to make a lighthearted rom-com set in what seems to be a fascist government state? Perhaps sensing my confusion, Gluck conducted a Reddit AMA last week, ahead of One Night Only’s premiere, where a lot of the questions were like, “Hey man, what the fuck is going on here?” To which he responded that his team “spent a lot of time talking about the rules of the world … but we didn’t want the movie to be about that.” Way too late on that front, Gluck.
Reddit Q&As aside, though, the only way to get answers to the questions this trailer raised was to—and you have to hand it to the marketing team on this one—actually go to see this movie. Which is how I ended up in an (admittedly packed) showing on Thursday night during which the audience spent most of the time alternating between tepidly laughing along with One Night Only’s stabs at satire and really laughing at the movie’s attempts to explain and evade its own premise in equal measure. So how did the movie itself back up the numerous queries its trailer raised? This is every question asked and answered—or more often, not answered—while watching One Night Only.
Who wrote this movie?
I think it’s important to note that before One Night Only—the movie that makes you ask, “So when did tradwife TikTok fully storm the Capitol?”—Braun had created and written 46 episodes of Pupstruction. This is a sort of Paw Patrol fever dream that aired on Disney+ and followed Phinny, an innovative young corgi, on a dogs-only construction crew that proves you don’t need big paws to have big dreams. (Also, it’s a musical.) Before that, Braun had written 75 episodes of T.O.T.S., an animated series wherein Pip the Penguin and Freddy the Flamingo become the first ever non-stork employees of the Tiny Ones Transportation Service. It’s also a musical …
So it’s safe to say that Braun was already dabbling in municipal governance and subversive public health services before One Night Only, but it’s unclear why, when he brought his head up for unanimated air, he said, “Let’s make this a little more federally mandated and a little more criminalized, and instead of The Purge, let’s get a couple of hotties on the horn and make The Urge.” But here we are.
Is the sex movie sexy?
No. This movie is entirely about not having sex and having access to condoms but not using them. This was the most abstinence-only-ass hour of my life, and I attended public school in Texas.
But why is no one having sex?
As the title card at the beginning of the movie tells us (10 seconds in and already a huge laugh, pretty impressive honestly): “Three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the United States … Except for one night.” So sex has been criminalized for anyone who isn’t legally married, but for one night a year, the government tells those non-marrieds (their term, not mine): OK fine, you can fuck, but only because we said so. And listen, it’s not that far-fetched that a democratic government’s puritanical fearmongering could creep slowly enough toward facism that a society realizes it’s sitting inside a boiling pit of institutional corruption and federally mandated surveillance but can’t seem to get out. What is a little far-fetched is that a moviegoing audience wouldn’t want some explanation about how that society has been affected by that descent into fascism.
OK, so what was the film society’s reaction to the criminalization of premarital sex?
“It’s been a lot,” says the third and final sentence of One Night Only’s opening chyron. And that’s the last time they’ll be addressing that—cue Callum Turner and that big-ass head, it's time for romance!
But wait—if the movie isn’t going to elaborate on how this nationwide chastity mandate is affecting society, will it at least explain how the mandate came to be?
Of course. Via a news clip that rolls in the background of a random scene, a U.S. senator says, “The American people wanted this mandate,” which is slightly contradicted by all of the “REPEAL” graffiti in the background of most of the movie. “Incels are celebrated now,” continues the senator, who’s described in Braun’s original script (available online because it did very well on The Black List in 2024) as “41, beard, Botox … definitely does not look exactly like JD Vance.” Not-JD-Vance goes on to say: “We wanted to go back to a time when sex was reserved for the sanctity of marriage.”
It’s not much, but it’s the most clarifying statement we get on why all of this came to be.
So … is this rom-com taking place under a totalitarian government?
I don’t know that it’s all the way there yet, but it’s getting close. Turner’s Owen at one point says that the people didn’t vote on the “Marriage First Mandate,” it was passed by Congress. To which LeVar Burton’s Rick responds that the people elected Congress to represent them. As they start to get into all that nitty-gritty, though, Molly Ringwald gets horny, so there’s no time to talk. It’s the one night a year that single people can have sex, after all!
And how does this night work?
Everything about it is so lame. It’s called “the One Night,” first of all, not even Fuck Night or something that might denote that people are about to start mounting each other on park benches after 364 days' worth of pent-up horniness. Plus, even on One Night, single people can’t fuck until the workday is finished. The allowed sex hours are from 7 p.m until 7 a.m., which is an extremely prudish time frame. Where is the rom? When is the com?!
How is the chastity mandate for single people enforced?
Oh, babe—through microchips. All the worst stuff starts with microchips. And mass surveillance, of course. Apparently at some point three years ago, all Americans over the age of 18 had biosensors implanted in their wrists, which are represented by a little tattoo of their choice (Allie, played by Monica Barbaro, has a lighthouse; Owen has a bat). Single people’s tattoos glow red because they’re not allowed to have sex, but from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. of One Night, they switch to green like married people’s. (The Empire State Building also glows green on One Night, just as thirsty as ever.) The biosensors apparently track dopamine, oxytocin, and testosterone levels. And if two—or presumably more?—non-married people’s biosensors spike next to one another, they flash and the authorities are alerted via 5G. And I know what you’re thinking …
What does this mean for mutual masturbation?
Nicholas Braun, who cameos as a tech bro who helped create the technology, doesn’t say. We know explicitly from propaganda posters from Health and Human Services that oral sex and anal sex are included in the chastity mandate, and solo spikes are considered OK. (As a reminder, within the world of the movie, they had to have talked extensively about this in Congress.) The only legal way to have any kind of sex outside of One Night is to be married.
There has to be some kind of loophole—what about soaking?
Single Mormons have been advancing the art of ethical non-chastity for centuries … but the movie never mentions soaking or any other kind of sexual loophole with that kind of specificity. As for other Mormon-coded work-arounds, it also goes unaddressed whether married people can have sex with other married people who aren’t their partner. Or whether people could enter into platonic marriages with friends and go about their daily lives.
How are queer people faring under the puritanical government of One Night Only?
In the real world, specific sex acts were banned in the United States for centuries and used to criminally punish gay people. Those laws were eventually eradicated in 2003, but it’s surprising to see Allie’s gay roommate, Arya, be so chill about the film’s mandate, despite being single. “Tonight is for the straights,” she says about One Night. “We’ve been dancing around your laws since before the Bible.” Pre-Bible and post-biosensor seem like … pretty different times in terms of dancing around laws, but the movie simply refuses to elaborate on this topic further.
So how is this government punishing single people who have sex outside of One Night? Fines? Incarceration? Something worse?
Allie and Owen visit the police station several different times over the course of their One Night adventure, but never because they directly violate a rule. The cops first arrive when Allie is about to have One Night sex with a man, presumably because their heightened biosensors alerted the cops to their location, and the man is wanted for violating the mandate 14 times in eight days. The police haul the guy off in cuffs, which would suggest jail time, but he's obviously a big offender. Gluck told Polygon that if you’re a serial single sex-haver like that guy, you’d probably get jail time, but “My guess is, if you do it many times, there’s probably fines involved.” And I’ll just say, that lack of specificity really comes through in the movie.
How do people prepare for One Night?
Not well! No one really seems to care that sex has been taken away from them, and no one that we spend time with seems all that ready for the 12 hours, either. Because of some initial mix-ups, neither Allie nor Owen has any condoms when they set about trying to find a last-minute partner for One Night, and every single store in Manhattan is completely sold out because so many other people also waited until One Night to buy condoms, despite the use of protection on One Night being mandated by the government. “I don’t care how many times you arrest me, I ain’t wearing no glove,” an old man yells as he’s hauled into the police station. There is no mention of hormonal birth control or IUDs, and certainly no mention of abortion in a movie that criminalizes sex. Because, my guess is, those aren’t funny—only condoms are funny! Especially when the people who want to legally have sex don’t have them and have to race around New York and compete with all of the other people who are also horny, but also didn’t prepare for their one night of sexual liberation.
Does the movie address whether forcing this many people to repress their sexual desires causes any problems? No change in people’s physical or mental health issues? No rise in assault or predation?
Nope!
So … were “the fascists right about this one”?
This is a question asked in the film by a very snake-in-the-grass dude. He’s a sort of romantic, feminist rhetoric spewer who whips his dick out the moment he’s wooed you (or Allie, as it were). So when he says, “I really thought this whole thing was going to ruin sex for me … and it kind of did, but at the same time, it gave it new meaning,” we’re not supposed to take him seriously. He immediately falls off a piano after saying it, and Maroon 5’s song “Payphone” plays while he’s wheeled through a hospital spewing blood. But … this is also the message of the movie. Which tells us that, because of the mandate, “teen pregnancy is near zero, STIs are at record lows,” and two stone-cold hotties can still fall in love and get married the old-fashioned way. All under a government-mandated surveillance state. Doesn’t that sound good? Doesn’t America want that?
Is this movie serious?
I don’t mean is this movie serious like Oppenheimer was serious—I mean, it was really hard to tell where this movie wanted to be taken seriously. We’re not supposed to interrogate the central premise too much. But we do need to understand it on a background level in order to play along. We are supposed to take the foregrounded rom-com seriously. But that rom-com is also being played as a bit of a parody. And while I think that playfulness around rom-com tropes was the most successful part of the film—Barbaro has one of the single best rom-com jobs ever put on screen, rearranging Michelle Branch and Sara Bareilles pop anthems into pharmaceutical jingles—I don’t know whether you can simultaneously be playful about fascism and rom-coms without undermining both concepts in the process.
The best rom-coms want you to think about the circumstances. Why is this person, at this particular time in their life, finding and falling in love with this person at this particular time in their life? One Night Only has not only made those circumstances extremely high stakes but also repeatedly asked us not to dwell on them. Would two hot people living in a dystopian society not have some feelings about their bodily autonomy being taken away from them? No, just focus on how funny the sex is under fascist rule! But don’t look too closely at the fascist rules!!!
In the end, on the one night a year that single people can legally have sex, do our single protagonists legally have sex?
You’re really not gonna believe this shit—no, they do not. After Allie and Owen express their true feelings for each other with an hour still to go on One Night, they decide that it’s the waiting that makes sex worthwhile. And they simply haven’t waited long enough yet to give the sex meaning.
This is such a misrepresentation of romance! It’s not the waiting that makes sex—or a rom-com—meaningful. It’s the yearning. It’s not the time spent; it’s the strength of feeling. No other film genre represents that deeply human experience on-screen like a rom-com. So the decision not to have the characters have sex at the end of this movie doesn’t feel like it upholds the governance of rom-coms—it feels like it upholds the governance of the movie (oopsie!).
So back to the question that started it all: Why is this a premise around which to make a rom-com?
I cannot make heads or tails of why this exists. Gluck—who also directed 2023’s Anyone but You and, most importantly to cinema history, 2010’s Easy A—told Variety that he removed “so much nudity” from One Night Only because he’s collected “long pages of empirical data” from two of his other movies that suggest a societal shift away from people being comfortable “seeing nudity or very adult situations in a big theater.” OK, but …
This movie is about the ONE night a year when single people are LEGALLY ALLOWED TO HAVE SEX??? I think if there’s a concern over very adult situations “taking people out of the movie,” then making a movie about having sex under fascist rule was a particularly high bar to clear. This sort of prudishness is a slippery slope toward a real world in which there’s only one night a year when it’s legal for single people to have sex, and again I say, no thank you. I arrived at the theater interested in One Night Only’s intentions, and I left baffled by its execution, while admittedly still having a few giggles. I guess if romance can persevere in the face of fascist rule, humor can persevere in the face of fascist rom-coms.
