‘One Night Only’ Turns Hookup Culture Into The Real Villain

“One Night Only” has an audacious premise, one designed to get people talking long before it arrived in theaters. In an alternative universe, Congress has passed a law dictating that singles may not have sex until marriage — except for, in a political compromise, one night a year.

A lot of things about this conceit don’t make sense, of course. Why is this movie a rom-com and not a dystopia? Why has every unmarried member of Congress not already been tossed in the clink? And why does this one night of legal free shagging not devolve into utter mayhem, orgies, and a windfall for STD clinics? But none of these questions, as you’ll see, really matter.

It seems an odd time for such a film, too. Gen Z is relatively sexless, so such a law isn’t even necessary for most kids these days. And yet we’re nowhere near a law like this being realistic, despite the dreams of the Trad Cons. But the film’s ridiculous premise has little to do with the actual plot; take it away, and you’re left with the misadventures and serendipitous story of young people looking for love.

This isn’t a sex comedy à la “Animal House” or “Easy A.” It’s a true rom-com, with all the trappings of the genre: a woman who’s a hopeless romantic, a heartbroken and hunky man, and the plot device that brings them together. 

Director Will Gluck previously helmed the much more sex-forward films “Anyone But You” (starring Sydney Sweeney and rated R for nudity) and “Easy A” (about a girl who becomes a modern-day Hester Prynne without actually having sex). This time, he said he listened to viewers who didn’t want random nudity.

“As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie,” he told Variety. “You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it.”

“One Night Only” is still rated R, but what brief sex scenes exist are less “Bridgerton” and more of the 2000s rom-com variety. And if the movie has a message, it is, ironically, that random hookups end pretty badly. 

At the beginning of the most libidinous night of the year, singer and hopeless romantic Allie (Monica Barbaro) meets up with her friend at a surprisingly un-packed bar so they can both find a “prince,” someone to hook up with for the night who won’t ghost them the next day. They both know the odds are slim. “The chance of having great sex on a one night-stand is like 2.8%,” Allie sighs. 

When her friend manages to find a literal prince in line for the bathroom, Allie is on her own, roaming the streets of New York in search of love “on the least romantic night of the year.”

Meanwhile, pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) is on a date with his girlfriend who breaks the news that she’d like to sleep with someone else tonight just to try it out. She encourages him to do the same, and he walks home, dejected, with an unrevealed engagement ring in his hand. 

Allie and Owen’s meet-cute is thrown off when he starts puking up the sushi he didn’t want to waste on his expensive date, yet they keep running into each other throughout the night as they look for other available singles. Of course, the plot keeps them from closing the deal with anyone else. In practice, this means that following your, well, not your heart, leads to comical misfortune. 

For the main characters, being unscrupulously horny leads to almost hooking up with an art thief, almost hooking up with a dopey singer who plays guitar in his underwear, and almost hooking up in your mother’s apartment (where your mother still resides).

Marriage, of course, is still on the table. When Owen’s mother suggests that he find some of his buddies to pick up women with, he responds that, due to the mandate, they’re already all married. (We never meet any of these friends as they are either enjoying the night or enjoying that they don’t have to take advantage of it.)

And Allie and Owen get trash-talked by the youth who are surprised to find these 30-somethings out and about. When two end up at a bodega fighting over the one available condom, a younger couple behind them balks, “Aren’t you kind of a little old?”

Even singer and popular “Repeal” campaigner Ezra has mixed views of the mandate, saying that it makes the night’s choice more significant. “Just maybe the fascists were right about this one,” he muses. 

Spoiler: At the end of the night, Allie and Owen don’t even have sex. After they finally reconnect with just a few minutes to spare before the mandate is back in effect, they decide to wait and give their relationship a real shot.

The concept of a no-sex mandate raises a lot of questions that are self-consciously answered by the film. It does explain some of the logistics; everyone has a tracker in their arm that checks hormone levels and flags the authorities if two nearby singles’ oxytocin levels spike at the same time. A politician on the news claims that teen pregnancies are “near zero,” STIs are down, and, comically, now “it’s a badge of honor to be an incel.”

But the film isn’t really about the mandate, and as such, doesn’t need to spend more time explaining it. Our attempts to understand this sci-fi world are as fruitless as the characters’ efforts to oppose it. “Repeal” is to the film’s characters what “resist” has become to today’s coastal dwellers, a futile but ubiquitous expression of one’s de rigueur politics. 

So, obviously, critics are complaining about the film’s lack of sex and anti-fascist campaigning. 

“‘One Night Only’ isn’t bawdy or trenchant enough for its concept,” complained the Associated Press. 

“‘One Night Only’ makes fun of purity culture, yet perpetuates it,” declares a Mashable headline, followed by the improbable subhead, “The rom-com imagines a fascistic U.S. that’s not too different from the one we’re living in.”

“One Night Only Might Actually Be the Darkest Movie of the Year,” declared a Vulture review that called the film “thrillingly cynical.”

Never mind that the Left would have preferred an NC-17 commentary on #resisting Trump’s America. “One Night Only” isn’t interested in politics or dystopia or any “1984”-esque anti-sex themes it conjures. At its core, it’s about looking for romance when everyone around you is looking for sex, and it suggests that for the two to go together, the latter is going to have to wait.

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