Callum Turner as Owen, left, and Monica Barbaro as Allie in director Will Gluck's 'One Night Only.'Nicole Rivelli / Universal Pictu/Supplied
One Night Only
Directed by Will Gluck
Written by Travis Baum
Starring Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner and Maya Hawke
Classification PG; 102 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 7
Somewhere at Universal Pictures, there’s an executive who probably hates romcoms but was sold on the pitch that One Night Only is “The Purge but for sex,” or “the romcom’s answer to The Purge.” That’s essentially what the awkward premise behind One Night Only boils down to.
The alleged romcom, starring a delightful Monica Barbaro and Dua Lipa’s husband Callum Turner, is set in an alternative universe. Premarital sex has been outlawed in the United States, except, as the title spells out, for one night only. So instead of pitchfork mobs turning the country red with murder, as in the Purge movies, we get thousands of horny New York City singles tearing into the streets searching for an orgy, stripping in the back seats of cars or up against restaurant windows, and getting it on like jackrabbits to make the most of their 12-hour window.
This world-building can be amusing for a minute. Singles are aggressively swiping right to find a match for the night, or flooding into bars speed dating. They rush past meet-cute and head straight for sexual harassment because the countdown is on. Meanwhile, local businesses take to price gouging anything and everything that helps customers get laid. $165 for a haircut. $200 for a condom. $2,000 for babysitting. Director Will Gluck, of Easy A and Peter Rabbit fame, knows how to have the most frothy and animated fun with silly scenarios.
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But The Purge’s set-up had the politics of its time – from Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump’s extremism – crashing through its windows, perhaps in the most superficial terms. One Night Only keeps real-world parallels decorative and distant; as if its main characters barely have a stake in a society where the president says the word “incel” is now a badge of honour. Try and find at least one person who is seething, who does something more than sticking a “repeal” flag in their window or questioning a police officer about whether enforcing puritanism is a worthwhile use of resources.
It’s not that I want my romcoms political. I don’t expect to come out radicalized by a movie directed by Gluck, whose last movie was the blockbuster Sydney Sweeney comedy Anyone But You. But all the wasted breath on One Night Only’s high-concept premise takes away from the romcom of it all and gives back nothing in return.
Our two unfortunate leads struggle to work up genuine sparks with each other or any one of their other attempted hookups, writes Radheyan Simonpillai.Nicole Rivelli/The Associated Press
The precious meet-cute moments in Travis Baum’s script, which was voted the most liked unproduced script on the 2024 Black List, buckle under the weight of exposition. Explanations of how a sex-law mandate is the latest attack on bodily autonomy, from a very Trump-coded administration, become this movie’s belaboured idea of foreplay.
Our two unfortunate leads, Barbaro’s Allie and Turner’s Owen, tiptoe around One Night Only’s passive politics, which sneaks an Omicron reference into its perhaps bipartisan consideration for bodily autonomy, while struggling to work up genuine sparks with each other or any one of their other attempted hookups.
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I’m tempted to say that Barbaro, an Oscar nominee for her performance as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, is slumming it here. Only she never seems to stoop down to the movie’s level, even when playing along with some of its desperate and contrived slapstick. If anything, she elevates that stuff with her warmth, magnetism and genuinely playful sense of humour.
Barbaro makes the most of those vocals we heard in A Complete Unknown as Allie, a singer stuck recording jingles, searching for hilariously melodic ways to sing about psoriasis or the benefits of a product called Vag-a-clear. During her desperate night out, in the hopes to find a hook-up that could be meaningful, she runs into Owen.
He’s a pizza shop owner sore that his girlfriend would choose to spend this one night when sex is legal with someone other than him. The girlfriend is played by Maya Hawke. The actor playing the alternate she chooses to boink is not worth spoiling. So much of the modest fun in One Night Only leans on the famous faces that unexpectedly pop up, livening up scenes opposite Turner, who is like Ben Affleck if you take away the Boston and the hairline. I’m not sure what you’re left with.
Turner comes off in recent roles as a humourless heartthrob who has outgrown the YA romances he seems perfectly suited to, writes Radheyan Simonpillai.Nicole Rivelli/The Associated Press
Turner is an undeniably attractive actor, with obvious polite charms he plies all too eagerly. But he comes off in recent roles as a humourless heartthrob who has outgrown the YA romances he seems perfectly suited to. He can’t quite find his footing in the more adult fare, opposite the much stronger actresses he’s been paired against (before this we saw him opposite Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity).
That leaves One Night Only’s romance as unengaged as its politics, the sparks that fly at the end feeling like its been imposed on us, as if by mandate.