Director: Will Gluck
Stars: Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner, Quintessa Swindell
Walking down to my local Vue cinema with a ticket for One Night Only booked several days prior, I asked myself with genuine uncertainty, “Why am I going to see the Sex Purge movie exactly?”. For a moment I was flummoxed and couldn’t remember. Then it came back. When Will Gluck’s latest high-concept romcom hit American cinema screens four weeks ago, Marya E. Gates’ scathing review for RogerEbert.com went viral (as viral as reviews go) for her eviscerating takedown, which went so far as to label the film ‘fascist’. In our – and America’s – current climate in which fascist edicts are being worryingly normalised through doomscrolling repetition, the political potentia of what sounded like a car crash popcorn flick got me morbidly curious.
Certain things about this glossy, idiotic, flatly unfunny romcom have already brought it mockery or derision. Sold on the idea that it takes place in a near future in which premarital sex has been outlawed across the US save for one night of the year, that first round of reviews – bad or indifferent – commented ruefully that it was (and is) totally sexless. Hitting the UK in the same week as Gregg Araki’s irreverent, relatively explicit and (mostly) sex positive indie feature I Want Your Sex, One Night Only has suddenly taken on the appearance of a litmus test for where studio pictures are currently on the subject of sex in the movies.
It’s not a lens through which Gluck’s movie looks good at all.
Consistent charisma vacuum Callum Turner is Owen, a pizzeria employee in Upper Manhattan who, on the night in question, is told by his girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke) that she’d rather sleep with someone else. Dejected, he heads out into the horny New York night to find someone else to fuck. Across the city, single commercial singer Allie (Monica Barbaro) is ditched by her bestie early in the evening. Poured into a miniature sparkly dress by her queer Black friend Arya (Quintessa Swindell, the only one here behaving like a real person), Allie ventures out into the night solo. These two seem fated to cross paths over and over again as they experience a slew of misadventures both together and separately, until they start wondering if they’re somehow meant to be together.
I wanted to give One Night Only the fairest of chances but I’m sorry, no, everything about this movie sucks. Allie is a semi-acceptable boilerplate romcom creation. Owen an edgeless ‘nice guy’ with a wholly off-putting high opinion of himself. Barbaro and Turner both show a barebones understanding of comic timing, but the chemistry is wooden and unconvincing whenever they share a scene. Gluck, whose last movie was the Shakespeare riffing hit Anyone But You, treats the shoot as an opportunity for a parade of smug-feeling cameos from his Hollywood friends and a slew of in-your-face corporate tie-ins (do not attempt to drink every time you hear the brands Buck Mason or Durex). Plus, even by comfy NY romcom standards, a genuinely awful parade of needle drops. Some of the worst songs you’ll have ever heard.
But the approach to the concept itself is the most dispiriting and what tips One Night Only from acceptably bad to genuinely grim. It is, as advised, laughably sexless. Not a titty or a dong to be seen. An offhand query between friends, “Is your location on?” is almost the only acknowledgement of the dangerousness of the movie’s pent-up energy. Someone else jokes about getting roofied later, too, and this sets the cowardly, blasé tone for the rest of the picture. Who wants to sully a fun time with logistics and reality, right? Even the police resent it, but whaddaya gonna do? Disobey??
This is also a squarely and reductively hetero-normative affair. Asexuality isn’t a concept that tessalates with One Night Only. Queerness of any kind is kept to the background or worse, in the year of our lord 2026, still the recourse of a suggestive punchline. There’s no room for the full or even partial spectrum of human sexuality in Gluck’s myopic dystopia, and the clumsy effort to explain this away brings forth its own daunting implications.
“Tonight is for the straights,” Arya dismisses before adding, “We’ve been dancing around your laws for years”. The context of this line feels loaded. A further normalisation of historical inequality and, by extension, a dismissal of past (and present) emotional and practical hardships for non-cishet individuals. Dealing it to a Black woman opens up a whole other closet of skeletons that One Night Only doesn’t have the time or inclination to address. It’s an early tipper to the kind of sickening apologia that the movie turns into.
I sat there thinking, well, maybe Gates overreacted or was coerced into a clickbait take on the picture (knowing full-well that’s generally not how film criticism operates). But the longer it went on, the more I couldn’t help but side with her view. Owen, described as “super-programmed”, who orders the set menu at a restaurant, seems pretty happy with The Mandate, as everyone calls it. Going a year without sex “wasn’t so bad” and, while talk of repeals and protests occurs sometimes in the background, there’s no sense of movement to this, especially when the coda flashes us forward a year and nothing’s changed.
But it doesn’t stop there. Russell Brand-looking popstar douchebag Ezra Stone (Charlie Gillespie) ruins his chances with Allie, but not because he throws away the galling observation “maybe the fascists were right“. And sex in One Night Only repeatedly seems like a negative thing; something that various characters are ultimately punished for wanting or pursuing. This isn’t a Handmaid’s Tale style warning about the puritanical implications of a fascist stranglehold. It’s the lackie’s reassurance that it won’t be so bad; just submit. Nauseating. The ultimate decision by all parties present to tow the line, to kowtow to Big Brother (or whoever) feels like an act of risible cowardice, particularly in our current political climate. Something which, by the way, the movie is moved to blame on Obama (not a perfect president by any means but jeez).
There’s one glimmer of a reason to champion this galling, squandered opportunity. While geographically a little frazzled, the best element by far is how the film evokes a sense of New York as a true 24 hour city. That’s the real and only romanticism of One Night Only. But you can find that in dozens – hundreds – of better films, horny or otherwise. With that in mind, don’t do as I did. Take Gates’ word for it. If not the absolute worst movie of the year (it can thank Mercy and Scream 7), it’s still in the bottom of the barrel with them.
Gutter trash.
The Lost Highway Hotel 