One Night Only review: Callum Turner, Monica Barbaro’s chemistry has nowhere to go in prudish rom-com

On the designated night of government sanction, New York becomes a frantic marketplace for sex, with condoms suddenly treated like precious commodities. It is an idea so absurd that it could have gone in almost any direction: political satire, dystopian comedy, a gleefully filthy sex farce, or something considerably darker.

Instead, the film uses this strange world to tell a very familiar story about Owen (Callum Turner), a pizza-shop owner whose girlfriend announces that she would rather spend the annual exemption night with someone else, and Allie (Monica Barbaro), a jingle singer who is single but uninterested in treating the night as a compulsory hookup marathon.

As they separately navigate New York in search of companionship, their paths keep crossing until the two strangers begin to realise that perhaps what they were looking for was each other. It is the sort of premise on which a classic romantic comedy could build an entire city-wide adventure: two people, one night, a ticking clock and fate repeatedly throwing them together.

The lost idea

But One Night Only seems frightened of its own premise. The film’s strangest choice is not that it imagines a government imposing such an authoritarian restriction. It is that, after introducing this premise, it proceeds to behave as though the restriction is basically fine. The law is an inconvenience, occasionally an amusing one, rather than an intolerable violation. There are signs demanding its repeal and fleeting glimpses of people who resist it, but the larger population appears remarkably resigned.

Even more oddly, the film eventually seems to endorse the moral logic underpinning the prohibition: casual sex is frivolous, committed romantic connection is meaningful, and the two protagonists’ refusal to participate in the annual frenzy becomes proof of their superior emotional maturity.

That is a remarkably conservative destination for a film whose entire marketing pitch is essentially: what if America banned sex?

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The problem is not that One Night Only wants to make a romantic argument for emotional intimacy. There is a perfectly good film somewhere inside that idea. The problem is that it gets there by treating sex itself as something vaguely embarrassing, something that must ultimately be distinguished from “real” romance. For a film ostensibly built around a society going berserk over its one legal night of sexual freedom, it is curiously prudish about desire.

In a way, that prudishness feels less like a deliberate thematic position than the symptom of something larger: Hollywood’s increasingly risk-averse relationship with romantic comedies itself. What else can explain the fact that even when it has an outrageous idea in its hands, One Night Only seems determined to sand down anything that might make it genuinely provocative?

The irony is that Gluck knows this genre extremely well. He has made a career out of the machinery of the rom-com — bickering strangers, elaborate misunderstandings, chance encounters, the city as romantic playground, the final sprint towards the person who suddenly matters. One Night Only dutifully assembles all the pieces, but the machinery is more visible than the magic.

Still, there is plenty of opportunity for charm. There is even a wonderfully old-fashioned pleasure in watching two attractive people wander around New York, gradually becoming interested in each other. Gluck shoots the city with the bright, bustling confidence of someone who understands why New York has been the third lead in romantic comedies for decades.

And Turner and Barbaro’s chemistry is the film’s most convincing argument for itself. Turner gives Owen an appealing awkwardness, while Barbaro brings Allie a warmth and self-possession that prevents her from becoming another interchangeable rom-com fantasy. When they are simply allowed to talk, tease one another or share an ordinary moment — particularly during the pizza-making sequence — there is a sense of ease that the screenplay repeatedly struggles to manufacture elsewhere.

The rom-com that could have been

This is where the conservative premise and the conservative storytelling become the same problem. One Night Only takes a genuinely outrageous idea and repeatedly retreats towards the safest possible conclusion. It gestures at authoritarianism without confronting it, invokes sexual liberation while quietly distrusting sex and constructs a world in which bodily autonomy has been legislated away only to discover that perhaps people were better off choosing romance anyway.

It is difficult not to see that as a metaphor for the current state of the studio rom-com itself. The genre has spent years being told that it needs to be resurrected, reinvented, made respectable enough to justify its existence in a theatrical marketplace increasingly dominated by franchises and spectacle. But One Night Only demonstrates the danger of that thinking. In trying so hard to make the rom-com palatable, it strips away the very qualities that once made the genre exciting: sexual tension, bad decisions, emotional messiness, characters who behave irrationally because they are in love.

The great romantic comedies have never required their characters to be morally exemplary. They require them to be interesting. One Night Only has two actors who can make interesting things happen simply by looking at each other. Barbaro and Turner have the elusive quality that casting directors can search for indefinitely and scripts cannot manufacture: they seem to enjoy being in the same frame. There are moments when their flirtation feels spontaneous enough to suggest the film might finally loosen its grip and become the sexy, silly, swooning comedy it promises to be.

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That it never does makes One Night Only less a bad idea than a wasted one. Its premise is bonkers; its leads are charming; its New York setting is gorgeous; and some of its physical comedy genuinely works. But every time the film gets close to something unruly or interesting, it pulls back towards the reassuring proposition that what people really want is not sex but love — as though the two were opposing forces rather than frequently overlapping ones.

That is to say, One Night Only ultimately feels less like a failed attempt to revive the rom-com than a revealing example of why the genre is struggling to do so. It has the stars, the setting and the machinery of the old studio romance, but not the willingness to let any of it become unruly. Its most provocative idea is neutralised; its sexual politics are softened into a lesson about “real” love; and its best asset — the palpable connection between Barbaro and Turner — is left stranded inside a screenplay that never quite trusts its own characters to want what they want.

In the end, what should have been a raucous, sexy, politically mischievous return to the genre becomes something much safer: a film about sexual freedom that seems most comfortable when nobody actually exercises it.