Equal parts George Orwell and unrestrained teenage hormones, director Will Gluck’s One Night Only imagines a dystopian America where a religious administration has banned premarital sex. The preposterous prohibition is enforced through biometric sensors that detect certain hormonal spikes and summon SWAT teams to thwart your carnal endeavors.The only caveat to this prudish regime, like some raunchy remake of 2013’s The Purge, is a single day of the year when the unwed are permitted to copulate: “one night only,” hence the title of the film. From this absurd premise, Gluck fashions a surprisingly sweet romantic comedy about two people searching for meaning in intimacy amid a culture that increasingly reduces affection to hedonistic pursuit.From the outset, we are introduced to Owen (Callum Turner). Today is the big day, and like any well-intentioned romantic, he takes his girlfriend to a fancy sushi restaurant where he plans to propose. His grand gesture is met with: “I want to sleep with someone else tonight,” followed by her kind and confident reassurance that “we will get through this.” Owen is understandably less convinced (they do not get through it).
One Night Only is best understood as a satire of contemporary dating culture, where sex is often treated as casually as a hug or handshake and dating, for many, becomes less a search for a life partner than an indefinite pursuit of fun. Gluck simply literalizes the arrangement. Everyone is handed a government-sanctioned evening to dispense with courtship, commitment, and romantic pretense altogether.Meanwhile, Allie (Monica Barbaro), another millennial romantic and aspiring singer whose day job amounts to recording dainty advertisements for psoriasis medication, vies for a Valentine of her own. She goes out with a friend, drinking tequila shots to “finding love on the least romantic night of the year.” Allie at least harbors some skepticism about flinging herself upon the first available prospect, calculating that “there is roughly a 2.81% chance of good sex on a one-night stand.”Her friend is less discriminating. Within minutes, she abandons their pact and runs off with an African prince, wishing Allie luck on her way out — not two minutes after complaining that the impromptu fling she found the previous year had ghosted her. There is something faintly Truman Show-esque about Owen and Allie: two lonesome, quixotic figures searching for authentic connection inside a world whose absurd customs everyone else seems perfectly content to accept.The narrative unfolds over this sole day of permissible promiscuity. With only hours remaining to do the deed, Gluck sends us through a densely populated New York awash in parks, parking lots, restaurants, bars, and subway stations, as eager strangers carnally leap upon one another wherever space permits. The city becomes a giant singles mixer stripped of whatever residual decorum dating culture had left.This image released by Universal Pictures shows Monica Barbaro, left, and Callum Turner, center, with director Will Gluck on the set of “One Night Only.” (Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures via AP)
