Premarital sex is only legal for twelve hours of the year in this new romantic comedy that ponders the question of what America would look like if it descended into fascism.
Fancy that.
One Night Only stars Callum Turner, one of the hunky young actors who seems to seriously be in the running for the next Bond, and Top Gun: Maverick and A Complete Unknown’s Monica Barbaro as Owen and Allie, two thirty-somethings looking for love on the least romantic night of the year.
‘You go out there and leave it all on the field.’
It’s a strange premise for a romcom, especially set against a Manhattan backdrop, with hordes of people literally flinging themselves about the place in the hope of a good time. The world-building is a bit slapdash. While the Purge films ushered in their own respective nights of chaos with a TV broadcast, this hip new event simply starts with a fittingly 2020s phone alert, right down to the yellow triangle with an exclamation mark.
Short clips from the news let us know that in the three years since the Mandate came into effect, teenage pregnancy and STIs are at an all-time low and being an incel is now a desirable and respected trait – perhaps the definition of ‘swings and roundabouts’. I did enjoy the fact that wherever Owen and Allie go, every inch of the city has been appropriately decked out in risqué adverts from every brand you could think of, from Red Bull to Dunkin’ Donuts. One could argue that these companies wouldn’t want to associate themselves with such a night of debauchery, but given how every single person in this film seems to live for The One Night, it’s clear that every executive in America would want to get in on that cash cow.
To that end, it seems odd that you’d enforce a nationwide Mandate in the hopes of minimising these activities, especially when its very enforcement seemingly has the populace in a death grip. There are surely splinter groups working under the radar to keep the party up all year round. We see people arrested for doing just that – especially for forgoing the mandatory use of protection, which seems like an impossible addition to keep in check – and who knows what other crimes are happening while Police pour hundreds of man hours into this effort. Hey ho, I’m not in government, so it’s not my problem.
Owen and Allie share a problem though – they’ve both got nobody to spend the night with! Maya Hawke, who played Robin in Stranger Things, crops up here as Owen’s long-time girlfriend, who proposes that they both get to know other people for a change just as he was about to pop the question. Allie, on the other hand, has been single for however long and has chosen this night, of all nights, to get her act together. Owen couldn’t see his catastrophe coming – that’s fair – but we can surely take Allie to task for her procrastination when finding someone to buddy up with.
The pair’s sexcapades across New York from 7pm to 7am see them weave in and out of each other’s nights, bickering and flirting every time. They both have their own trials and tribulations to contend with – whether they’re falling head over heels for a motorcyclist musician or stumbling into a crime scene after a Tinder date gone wrong – and the humour in these moments is incredibly hit and miss. There was one laugh-out-loud moment that really did get me, but it came very early and as a result, I spent most of the movie looking (in vain) for that energy to come back.
Your mileage with this will almost certainly come down to a tolerance for blatantly sexual humour. It feels par for the course with the subject matter, but this is a world where everyone’s attitudes are cranked up well past eleven, so tactfulness isn’t exactly the watch word here. A lot of the characterisation is very cartoonish, especially when it comes to the many advances from sleazy men that Allie comes up against during her night.
Obviously, she finds them irritating, so it makes sense that we would find them irritating to watch – that’s intentional – but it still doesn’t result in much fun on our end, and the film just has a sickly quality to it as a result, stuck somewhere in the uncanny valley between a wholesome flick and a more mean-spirited and interesting one. That may be to your taste – there was a group of ladies to the right of me who laughed throughout – but one woman in the row ahead walked right out of the room quite early on and never came back. Do with that information as you will.
Luckily, Turner and Barbaro are the best parts of their own movie. I’ve liked them both in what I’ve seen from them in the past and they spark off quite well together here. They’re frustratingly fun opposite each other in the brief moments where the film’s zany plot isn’t throwing something outrageous at them. One scene shows them bonding over a pizza at Owen’s self-owned pizzeria (yes, he has his own business!) which has a nice whack of natural chemistry to it, but that simplicity takes the backseat almost everywhere else, as the story feels the need to keep us busy with Manhattan’s most underwhelming heist sequence and a whole thread about Allie finding the courage to sing on stage that’s almost a straight lift of an unbearable subplot from that New Year’s Eve movie from years past.
I would’ve loved One Night Only to have more confidence in the dynamic between its two leads, because as it stands I feel as though everything else around them works against their actual story at play here. There’s so much to establish and so many ‘quirky, zany, crazy’ little interludes going on around them that I feel we as the audience were kind of robbed of a much more enjoyable and believable romcom between these two. I wouldn’t mind seeing them paired up again, but as it stands here, the film manages to conclude on one hell of a flat note.
Without delving into spoilers, its eleventh hour conjecture about the idea of the Mandate as a whole feels ethically dubious, especially when there’s a significant effort made to show characters equating the government’s involvement with actual fascism. Perhaps such issues serve as a sign that this picture as a whole bit off far more than it could ever hope to chew in a hundred minutes while also trying to balance all the trappings of your usual romantic comedy. Definitely a strange cocktail of ideas all round.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language, sex references.
One Night Only is in cinemas now.
