A high-concept romantic comedy is a difficult thing to pull off. The success of any romcom is so dependent on any number of ordinary yet intangible factors — star chemistry, warmth, a general sense of goodwill toward all involved — that when you massively complicate the rules of the game, the balance is thrown off. With “One Night Only,” those intangibles are largely in place: In Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, it’s got two attractive, pleasingly grown-up leads whom you wouldn’t mind seeing get together; it’s set in New York City at its most invitingly balmy; it even has the odd one-liner that nets an actual laugh. (Not to be taken for granted in a genre increasingly heavy on dialogue with the cadence of jokes, but not the punchlines.)
It’s also saddled with a high concept so high as to neutralize all those considerable pluses, for once it’s introduced, not for a moment can you think about anything else. And it’s introduced mere seconds in, with a series of explanatory title cards sure to instantly bewilder any uninformed viewers who went in only wanting a perky date-night diversion. Three years ago, we are told, premarital sex was outlawed in the U.S. (What year the film calls the present is never established, though the world looks more or less the same as it does now.) For one night a year, however, the mandate is suspended, and the horny unwed are legally permitted to get it on. “It’s a lot,” conclude the title cards — and it sure is. Before anyone has even met cute, “One Night Only” sunnily swerves from “When Harry Met Sally…” terrain to thoughts of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by way of “The Purge.” Viewers may need some time to process.
Travis Braun’s script, however, gives us none, immediately going on to treat this grim dystopian scenario as little more than a quirky pretext for accelerated romantic progress, while director Will Gluck — whose last romcom outing, “Anyone but You,” was the genre’s biggest multiplex hit in a while — determinedly keeps the lighting bright and the tone brighter still, as a King Princess cover of the buoyant disco staple “Love Is in the Air” fills the soundtrack. It’s National Sex Night, after all, which appears to have become something akin to summer Christmas, except the stores run out of condoms instead of turkeys. (Unprotected premarital sex remains verboten 365 days a year; the government apparently enforces this invasive law via advanced tattoo-style tracking chips on every adult citizen’s wrist.)
Among those intending to celebrate are Owen (Turner), who owns a pizzeria in upper Manhattan, and Allie (Barbaro), an aspiring chanteuse stuck singing pharmaceutical jingles for a living. (Ripping off pop standards, these tacky, overwrought tunes are some of the film’s funniest material.) While she’s single and heading out to hook up, he’s looking forward to his annual roll in the hay with long-term girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke). (Why they haven’t got hitched to get around the ban is just one of many unanswered questions here.) But when Malika drops the bombshell at dinner that she’d prefer to open the relationship and sleep with someone else that night, Owen is suddenly cast into a frenzied city-wide scene of urgent Hinge matches and exclusive singles nights — and somehow, in a city of eight million people, Allie is the stranger he keeps bumping into.
They make a lovely couple, too: good-looking, good-humored, generally good catches. Except we’re not remotely invested in their repeatedly delayed but wholly inevitable union, because what even is this? The more “One Night Only” tries to extract starry-eyed vibes from the most chilling romantic comedy premise in memory, the more the cognitive dissonance of it all gets in the way. Beyond a brief interlude of soft political satire in which a red-tied POTUS is shown on TV defending the policy in the name of family values, Braun and Gluck have scant interest in showing how America functions in this climate of drastically curbed human rights: “Fuck the mandate” graffiti is scribbled around the city, but there’s no sign of any active resistance movement. Our view here is restricted to a band of middle-class urbanites shruggingly, cheerfully getting on with their lives — and maybe finding love! — in a time of state-monitored chastity.
If “One Night Only” is aiming to comment on the hollow, ineffective nature of much contemporary political activism, then job done. But it’s hard to shake the sense that no commentary on anything in particular is intended here, as a full spectrum of obvious targets — from Christian conservatism to unholy capitalism, from right to left — goes by untouched, while the film gradually betrays a sex-negative outlook nearly as prudish as the powers that be in this near-future America.
There’s no onscreen sex in this ostensible sex comedy, which is par for the course in even adult-oriented studio fare of late, though not since “Eyes Wide Shut” has New York City presented such manifold erotic possibilities to a character who isn’t getting any. More surprising, as third base retreats ever farther from view, is the curious pro-abstinence message that seems to emerge from an increasingly addled script, taking proceedings from silly to sinister. Waiting can be sexy, sure. Governmentally enforced waiting under pain of incarceration? Kind of an ick.
Is this overthinking a breezy late-summer date movie? Well, it would be, if “One Night Only” weren’t itself so simultaneously over- and under-thought: It rests on a structuring plot gimmick too complicated and too consequential to simply operate as romcom machinery, without straying into story territory it has no intention of covering. If you can set all that aside, the film has its pleasures: Turner, though too inherently, uprightly British to fully convince as a red-sauce guy, continues to show a quiet, off-kilter allure as a leading man, complementing Barbaro’s grounded, lightly spiky presence in ways you’d like to see unfold in a less contrived setup. Yaron Orbach’s lensing makes an airy, lacquered lovers’ playground even of a hot August night; the film gives us a postcard New York that at least looks somewhat lived-in.
Still, this is hell, right? At a time when Americans’ reproductive rights are very much under threat by the Trump administration, Owen and Allie’s will-they-won’t-they dance doesn’t play as escapist fantasy, but as a semi-absurdist projection of where we might all be headed. And if so, it’s hard not to feel that Gluck’s film hasn’t just chosen a strange genre on which to map its story, but the wrong story altogether: Surely the more satisfying, feel-good version of this oddly gutless film wouldn’t work toward a single couple’s happiness within the strictures of the mandate, but toward defeating the mandate altogether. That’s a lot to ask of a summer romcom, granted. But “One Night Only” asks an awful lot of us.
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