This is a quick review of the newly released film One Night Only. Please note that this is just one of the many movies I will have watched each year, and my initial grade for this film may change over time, for better or worse. To stay up to date on my thoughts about other movies and any potential changes in my opinion on this one, follow me on Letterboxd.
Plot
Via Letterboxd: Two love-starved strangers crash into each other on the one night of the year when single people are allowed to have sex.
Review
Let’s get the massive elephant in the room out of the way…
Yes, this entire movie’s premise is that of a dystopian fascist world where single people are only allowed one day, technically a twelve hour window, to have sex with one another. Someone came up with this bizarre, outlandish idea and decided, “Yeah, we can make a romantic comedy out of that.”
If you’re hoping the film makes any real attempt to ground or explain this wild premise, I have bad news - it does a pretty poor job of it. We get exposition about the sensors placed on non-married couples, how the law was passed, how it affects different sexual orientations, and even the supposed positive effects this legislation has supposedly had on society. Yet we’re somehow expected to ignore the obvious protests such a law would spark, the inevitable rise in assaults, the legal challenges, the underground resistance movements, and the complete lack of widespread panic or desperation surrounding the day itself. The movie desperately wants you to believe society has simply accepted this reality, but I never bought into it for a second.
Okay, so I didn’t buy the premise. What about the romance we’re actually supposed to care about?
Well, look, almost nobody is going to complain about watching Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro spend two hours trying to hook up (well... aside from their real-life partners). To the film’s credit, they do have genuinely good chemistry together. Unfortunately, as I watched them repeatedly dance around the fact they could simply choose each other and solve their problems, I found my mind wandering back to another thought, it’s getting exhausting that every modern romantic movie stars people who look like they belong on the cover of a fashion magazine. I understand audiences enjoy watching attractive people fall in love, but at some point I find myself thinking, “You know, us regular people also want to fall in love and fuck.”
The movie doesn’t exactly help itself when it asks us to believe Mr. Dua Lipa and one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood are somehow struggling to get laid.
By now you’ve probably noticed I spent more time trying to make sense of this world than actually investing in the romance. That’s because every time the movie accidentally stumbles into an interesting idea, it immediately backs away from it. A government regulating intimacy under threat of punishment? That’s a premise that could fuel a biting satire, a cautionary dystopian thriller, or a genuinely thought-provoking piece of science fiction. Instead, One Night Only uses it as little more than window dressing for a series of meet-cutes.
What’s even more frustrating is that the film occasionally seems aware of the moral implications of its own premise before immediately abandoning them. It hints at how oppressive this society is, then spends the rest of its runtime essentially telling its characters, and by extension the audience, to stop questioning it and just find a way to live happily within it. Rather than challenging authoritarianism, the movie ultimately feels like it’s advocating for subjugation to it. Its answer to living under a fascist state isn’t to resist, expose, or overthrow it. It’s to find your soulmate and make the best of it. That’s... certainly a choice.
Even setting the politics aside, the movie becomes repetitive after about ninety minutes. It’s just meet-cute after meet-cute as these two conveniently keep bumping into each other r trying to help one another until the screenplay decides it’s time for the next quirky interaction. The whole thing feels less like a theatrical release and more like the kind of movie you’d half-watch on HBO Max while folding laundry.
Ironically, my biggest frustration came because the movie eventually did get me invested enough to want these two to end up together. It mostly follows the predictable rom-com playbook... until the finale makes one baffling decision that, considering the already crackpot premise, is likely to have audiences throwing their hands in the air and yelling, “Come on!” loud enough for the rest of the theater to hear. It’s one of those endings that’s so contrived it almost dares you to laugh at it.
My final verdict on One Night Only is that you’re better off waiting until it inevitably lands on HBO Max in a few months. That is if you can somehow switch off the part of your brain that asks even the most basic questions, there’s a perfectly serviceable, completely forgettable rom-com buried underneath all of this. But if you’re looking for a movie that actually explores the fascinating dystopian world it created, or at the very least has something meaningful to say about love under authoritarianism, you’ll leave disappointed.
One Night Only? More like One Big C*** Block.
“TL;DR”
Pros: Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro actually have some decent chemistry which could lead some to find this another inoffensive rom-com that comes and goes in the year; Does feature some really fun cameos
Cons: The bizarre and outlandish premise made so much of this almost impossible to suspend disbelief with; The movie seems to try and set up major questions about this fascist-state it lives in and then seemingly tells its characters to just subjugate to it; A finale that will likely make some jump up from their seat and go “come on!”; Ultimately a very regressive film best for laughing at when drunk with friends
