One Night Only

One Night Only is so brazenly flirtatious, so determined to seduce, you’ll barely even notice how empty and cheap it feels – until the end, when you’re left alone again.

Who wouldn’t, after all, enjoy a date with a movie that’s shiny and bright and brilliantly packaged? And who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, as they fall in and out of low-stakes love?

There are some clever ideas in One Night Only, beginning with the intrigue of its central plot: with the United States now run by ultra-conservatives, single Americans are forbidden from sex 364 days a year. The movie opens on the 365th, as everyone in New York is prepping for the Big Event. Owen (Turner) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke), while Allie (Barbaro) is hoping to find romance, or at least a memorable hook-up, in a downtown bar. It is no spoiler – unless you’ve never seen a romcom, in which case surely don’t start here – to say that things go awry, leaving our leads about ten hours to find their way to each other.

The journey is, in fairness, pretty entertaining. Director Will Gluck has stuffed the story with so many cameos, he comes dangerously close to name-dropping. But it’s fun to see how much Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton, Mike Birbiglia, Pete Davidson, Bobby Cannavale, Julia Fox, etc. can make of their minutes onscreen. (FWIW, Burton wins.)

Who wants dystopian realities to ruin a feel-good comedy?

But eventually, as Owen and Allie bicker and banter and get into all sorts of silly scrapes while navigating what is, in fact, a fascistic hellscape, something feels… off. And it becomes clear that all the edges of this promising concept have been buffed to a disquieting gloss. When Gluck and writer Travis Braun invented a world in which every citizen is forcibly tattooed for government tracking, they knew what they were doing. They also knew what they were doing when they declined to follow through on the implications, choosing instead to stuff their story with product placement and painless larks. Who wants dystopian realities to ruin a feel-good comedy?

That unsettling smoothness extends to the protagonists: they are beautiful and charming and have no palpable chemistry, because they could have been played by any number of up-and-comers. Turner’s part in this industry churn is acknowledged with an excellent Glen Powell gag. But it’s a little tougher to see Barbaro – coming off a well-earned Oscar nom for A Complete Unknown – slotted into such a traditional role.

If you’re a fan of Gluck’s standard romcoms Anyone But You or Friends With Benefits, you’ll probably appreciate this one. But if you were hoping for something deeper, perhaps closer to his sharp-toothed masterwork Easy A? Then One Night Only’s refusal to engage with its own premise will come off as a terrible tease.

In US theaters Fri Aug 7. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 28