Where you sit on the liberal scale will directly affect how you feel about this film. Although it is set in the present day rather than some dystopian future, in the world of One Night Only premarital sex has been outlawed in the United States for three years. There is one exception: on one night each year, there is a 12-hour window in which anyone who didn’t want to put a ring on it can fornicate to their heart’s content without risking arrest. It’s a bit like The Purge – but for rumpy pumpy.
To ensure people don’t step out of line, everyone has been given biometric wrist tattoos that change colour during the 12-hour exemption. Personally, I have never found state control of citizens remotely romantic or funny, but I have been assured this is indeed a rom-com, as pizza shop owner Owen, played by Bond hopeful Callum Turner, and aspiring singer Allie (Monica Barbaro), repeatedly cross paths throughout the night.
Owen is trying to indulge his carnal desires after his girlfriend announces she plans to use the exemption to sleep with someone else. Meanwhile, Allie is looking for something more magical than a wham, bam, thank you ma’am.
With both searching for some kind of connection, this could have been a very short movie if their initial meeting hadn’t gone horribly awry, sending them both off in search of other people to bump uglies with.
Their various efforts, and their seemingly endless chance encounters, make up the bulk of a film that wants to be a whacky comedic adventure about people in the throes of lust losing their minds.
Instead, it comes across as political propaganda for abstinence and is, overall, rather preachy.
To confuse things even further, the premise is high-concept but the execution repeatedly relies on the lowest common denominator. Turner and Barbaro do their best, and there is genuine chemistry between them, but even they can’t overcome the film’s deeply conservative message.
There are some amusing moments and the cast have an undeniable charm, but the movie cannot escape its oppressive central premise.
The irony is that if you stripped away the dystopian element, this could have been a perfectly cute rom-com about a man whose girlfriend wants to sleep with someone else, sending him off in search of a one-night stand, while he repeatedly crosses paths with a woman looking for her Prince Charming in all the wrong places.
Instead, it wraps that simple story in a pseudo-political, nonsensical concept that overwhelms both the romantic and comedic elements. Which somewhat defeats the entire purpose of its existence.
One Night Only is in cinemas August 28.
