"One Night Only" Review: A Sinister 'Sex Comedy'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "One Night Only" stars Callum Turner as a pizzeria owner and Monica Barbaro as an aspiring singer who keep bumping into each other on the one annual night premarital sex is legal, with Maya Hawke as Turner's girlfriend who wants to open the relationship.
- Director Will Gluck reunites with the romcom format after "Anyone but You," previously the genre's biggest multiplex hit in a while, but the reviewer says the high-concept dystopian premise — three years after the U.S. outlawed premarital sex — overwhelms the film's lighter charms.
- The film contains no onscreen sex and, per the reviewer, drifts toward a curious pro-abstinence message that lands as "silly to sinister" given that Americans' reproductive rights are under live threat by the Trump administration.
- The political satire is limited to a brief TV clip of a red-tied POTUS defending the policy, with "Fuck the mandate" graffiti around New York but no depicted resistance movement; the reviewer argues the film squanders obvious targets from Christian conservatism to unholy capitalism.
- Travis Braun's script treats the chilling premise as little more than a "quirky pretext for accelerated romantic progress," according to Variety, which concludes Gluck picked "the wrong story" — a feel-good film in this world would aim to defeat the mandate, not work within it.
- The leads earn praise: Turner shows a "quiet, off-kilter allure" and Barbaro a "grounded, lightly spiky presence," with Yaron Orbach's lensing making even a hot August night look like a postcard — pleasures the reviewer says would land better in a less contrived setup.
Why it matters: The film arrives as U.S. reproductive rights face active rollback under the Trump administration, which the reviewer explicitly flags — meaning a breezy romcom built on governmentally enforced chastity isn't escapist fantasy but a near-future projection. By refusing to dramatize resistance, the film sidelines the genre's traditional social function and, in doing so, accidentally courts a sex-negative reading. For Gluck and studios, the risk is commercial: a premise that promises provocation delivers neither romance nor satire.
