One Night Only

Will Gluck’s would-be dystopian romantic comedy “One Night Only” takes place in a fictional version of America on the lone evening each year when outlawed premarital sex is officially legal for 12 hours. This means it comes across like a copycat version of The Purge series in which all crime is made legal for one 24-hour-period a year, as if some Universal executive yearned to get a piece of the Blumhouse horror pie. Travis Braun’s screenplay, however, was already on the so-called black list, promising scripts not yet produced, and plucked from there. I wonder, though, if everyone who read it and deemed it so promising was merely engaging with the overriding premise and not the nuts and bolts. Because romantic comedies are as much about plotting as they are about premise and despite the outrageous concept of “One Night Only,” the only thing outrageous about it is just how banal and prudish it proves to be. It’s as if John Carpenter envisioned the prison of “Escape from New York” as a white-collar, minimum-security resort, to quote “Office Space.” If not for the sequin minidress that Monica Barbaro spends most of the movie wearing, this would be the perfect sex comedy for your church lock-in. 

The central couple of “One Night Only” is aspiring singer Allie (Barbaro) and pizza place owner Owen (Callum Turner). She seeks an emotional connection as much as a 12-hour-fling while he seems to have already emotionally connected with Malika (Maya Hawke) to whom he plans to propose the night of the sex purge only for her to ditch him to try and sew some oats. In the aftermath of this heartbreak, Owen encounters Allie, they get to talking and forge a possible connection only for it go awry when Owen, uh, regurgitates his sushi dinner right in front of her. Relationships based on projectile vomit never work, I think is what Sandra Bullock said in “Speed.” As far as meet cutes go, this one isn’t much, causing as much gross discomfort as romantic tension. That lack of tension is underscored in their similar frames of mind. Even when they encounter other characters with whom they intend to sleep, Allie and Owen are portrayed as romantically chaste, meaning that the attendant plot complication of them scouring the city for a condom has no juice. Their need to fornicate is not dire. It says something that the hottest sequence in the whole movie turns out to be imaginary.

Like so much in “One Night Only,” their quest raises more questions than the movie is willing to answer. When Allie and Owen try to purchase the last remaining piece of protection at a convenience store, they become the victims of price-gouging, and though eventually Allie resorts to pilfering it, this is played for broad comedy rather than satire. The ideas that such price gouging intrinsically suggest, remain unexplored if not avoided altogether throughout. When Owen seems to stumble across a sexual assault on the street, it is revealed as nothing more than a movie being filmed, allowing for a couple brief celebrity cameos, shiny distractions from the complications to which the fake-out inherently alludes. That’s the thing, on some level “One Night Only” is aware of the dark side lingering just out of sight, but actively puts on blinkers, never curious about all the repeal signs in windows just as it is incurious about the looming specter of violence. For the most part, everyone on the streets just looks like the happy extra in a musical, content to play along with this one night only, I guess. When one character says, “I guess the fascists were right,” it’s a dumb joke that might have exposed the “One Night Only’s” point of view except it goes to such lengths to render its two characters as virtuous that I’m not even sure why we needed the fascism in the first place.