★★★☆☆
Such is the state of the USA right now that a government outlawing premarital sex for 364 days a year doesn’t even seem far fetched. The Will Gluck-directed One Night Only presents us with a New York where single people are tracked by authorities and only allowed to have sex once a year, within a 12-hour window. This day is a big deal in the movie, as is demonstrated by the relentless advertising on the streets, wall to wall news coverage and swathes of people getting intimate in public.
So with that in mind, you’d expect such a sex-centric movie to have a fair few sex scenes, right? WRONG. There is not a single sex scene here. We get everything apart from the one thing this movie is about. It’s like going to a restaurant and skipping the main course. Without the main, there isn’t much else left to savour apart from a starter (aka foreplay) and the dessert. Similarly, One Night Only is all starter, no main and just the implication of a dessert.
Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro play two characters whose individual pursuits of sex cause them to cross paths multiple times before finally doing something about it. And as is inevitable with a romantic comedy, they eventually get what they’re looking for (kind of). All of this is supported by comedy writing which is hilarious in some places and terrible in others, as well as appearances from the likes of King Princess, Molly Ringwald, Julia Fox and Pete Davidson. Were it not for Turner and Barbaro’s chemistry, we might have had a disaster on our hands.
One Night Only’s premise has so much potential. The whole idea of a government outlawing sex, and all the implications and consequences it brings with it, really deserves to be unpacked in more detail. Will Gluck unfortunately does not manage to pull this off. It has its moments (including the clichéd references and predictable mishaps), but ultimately you spend the whole movie waiting for the inevitable only for it to never happen.
