Gluck's 'One Night Only': Sex Ban Romcom, No Onscreen Sex
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- "One Night Only" is a romantic comedy directed by Will Gluck and written by Travis Braun, set in a near-future United States where premarital sex is outlawed 365 days a year and enforced via tracking chips on adult citizens' wrists, with the ban suspended for one annual "National Sex Night."
- Monica Barbaro plays Allie, an aspiring chanteuse stuck recording pharmaceutical jingles, and Callum Turner plays Owen, an upper Manhattan pizzeria owner whose long-term girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke) asks to open their relationship on Sex Night, sending him into a citywide scramble that keeps crossing Allie's path.
- Despite Yaron Orbach's airy NYC cinematography and two attractive, "pleasingly grown-up" leads, the film contains no onscreen sex, and the review argues an inadvertent pro-abstinence message emerges from its repeatedly delayed romantic resolution — "Waiting can be sexy, sure. Governmentally enforced waiting under pain of incarceration? Kind of an ick."
- The dystopian political scaffolding goes largely unexplored beyond brief satire: a red-tied POTUS defending family values on TV and "Fuck the mandate" graffiti around the city, with no active resistance movement depicted.
- Will Gluck previously directed "Anyone but You," which the review flags as the romcom genre's biggest recent multiplex hit — a track record the new film, with its grim premise dressed in romcom lighting and a King Princess disco cover, cannot replicate in tonal terms.
- Citing the Trump administration's ongoing threats to Americans' reproductive rights, the reviewer concludes the premise functions not as escapist date fare but as a "semi-absurdist projection" of a possible future, and that Gluck picked the wrong story by aiming at one couple's happiness within the mandate rather than its defeat.
Why it matters: By grafting a romcom onto a premise where the state enforces chastity via wrist chips, 'One Night Only' lands as social commentary whether Gluck intended it or not — and the review's central charge is that the film accidentally projects where U.S. reproductive-rights erosion could head, then refuses to engage with its own politics, leaving audiences to do the political work the script won't.
