Joel on Film

What was screenwriter Travis Braun thinking? Such is the thought that runs pervasively through the mind as we watch One Night Only, which could be just a thoroughly familiar romance but which is instead stuck inside a narrative scenario as invidious as it is gimmicky. The idea here is that, for one night per year, single and/or uncommitted people can legally have sex, as regulated by a type of biochemical sensor tattooed on the inside of their wrist—as long as they wear protection and as long as they don’t engage in anything but straight sex with, well, the traditional insertion of the one appendage into the expected orifice.

The idea, as the early stretches of the film tell us, is to curb the rate of teenage pregnancies by quite a lot, which doesn’t explain why adults are targeted for this experiment-turned-legislation that was provided to the government in collaboration with a Big Tech company. Does Braun believe he’s being clever somehow or, perhaps, that the usual rules governing the making of movies—i.e., the general understanding that depiction does not equal endorsement—will help us to ignore the obvious about all this? That he and director Will Gluck have given us a romantic comedy in which we’re supposed to find all this a little bit silly and, later, probably kind of cute just goes to show the degree to which all of this is in bad taste.

We’ve got enough going on in the real world with regard to the limiting of reproductive freedom, specifically that of women (and quite exclusively not in the other direction), without having to deal with it as some gimmick driving a would-be-wacky scenario. Putting aside that the conceit is not all that original (four movies and a TV series about decriminalized murder for 12 hours played out over the last decade and change, if one recalls), it is also patently insulting to our intelligence. That starts at the top and moves down, beginning with the idea that people played by Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner can’t find love or whatever else they desire on this particular night.

Theoretically, Gluck might be onto something here with a kind of casting coup. Turner is a handsome guy—a little dull as a screen presence, but appealing in an everyman sense as Owen. Barbaro is a bona fide movie star, no matter what the movie itself does to convince us that her Allie rather cynical about all this, before a final handful of scenes delivers the jarring, 180-degree reversal of the cynic’s confidence.

Owen is the owner of a pizza parlor, and his misfortune tonight is that his current girlfriend (played by Maya Hawke) wants to use the evening to sleep with someone else (again, this doesn’t make any sense, because the sensor tracks heart rate, not one’s own thoughts and feelings about the existential status of such arrangements). Allie is a self-conscious singer who has given up the dream of doing more than jingles for pharmaceutical ads. They keep bumping into each other over the course of the day, and yada-yada-yada.

You can probably get the idea from that, although it’s hard to predict just how strange and genuinely off-putting some of its narrative asides are—from Owen being lured into a one-night-stand with an older woman who has the apparent influence of a mafioso, to Allie being given the opportunity to spend some alone time with a local pop star who turns out to be a self-obsessed weirdo, to an extended gag involving a display case for a $200 condom (don’t ask) that might as well be the heist of the century, to a misunderstanding that leads Allie into a trap laid by an art thief, to many other things that—one supposes—should be left to the viewership of you, dear reader. That, of course, would involve going to see this movie. This is very much not recommended.

If the movie’s weirdly conservative bent begins with its part-odious, part-idiotic premise, of course it extends to the tokenism of some other characters, such as Allie’s queer black roommate (played by Quintessa Swindell) who gets literally nothing to do, and attitudes, such as the inclusion of Owen’s mother (played by Molly Ringwald) and her sexual partner for the evening (played by Levar Burton, for some reason) as a way of getting the older generation into this arrangement. It’s all lip service that the movie doesn’t even buy into, because why should it when there’s the opportunity to paint a sex worker as a scheming robber-in-disguise? That, by the way, is a whole avenue the filmmakers display no interest in exploring, except for the benefit of a handcuff gag that goes down like soured milk.

If this is what passes for allegedly cute romantic comedies these days, then at least we can say that Barbaro is quite charming and that Yaron Orbach’s cinematography is sleek and attractive. Otherwise, One Night Only is a really bad idea, buried beneath a lot of even worse ones, at the service of what can only be described as a loving ode to fascism.

Rating: ½* (out of ****)