'One Night Only' features two hot co-stars and an outrageous premise

Adam Graham, Detroit News Film CriticThu, August 6, 2026 at 4:01 AM UTC

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In the randy rom-com "One Night Only," a puritanical, overreaching government has banned singles from having sex for all but one night a year.

It's such a flabbergasting setup — who proposed this ordinance? How on Earth did it pass? Does this movie take place in "The Purge" universe? — that it would sink most attempts to make it work.

But director Will Gluck ("Easy A," "Anyone But You") focuses on the chemistry between his two insanely hot leads and uses the particulars of his premise as obstacles for them to overcome, and scores a winner of a summertime comic romance.

Callum Turner is Owen, a New York pizzeria owner, and Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro ("A Complete Unknown") is Allie, an aspiring singer stuck peddling pop jingles for prescription drug commercials. Both are wildly good-looking, a fact which the movie wisely acknowledges by having everyone in their universes constantly commenting on their attractiveness. Hey, why hide it?

They meet early, and it's the movie's job to keep them apart until they both realize they're the ones for each other. And the movie's got quite a doozy of a device to keep 'em separated.

At first, the movie introduces its premise in an on-screen graphic which quickly explains that three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the U.S. except for one night a year. "It's been a lot," the explainer tells us, and then drops the subject entirely. And you're suddenly worried the movie just "yada yada'd" over all the important stuff and the audience is just supposed to buy this outlandish reality.

But the script by Travis Braun slowly fills in the details through bits of exposition — a whole predatory economy has built up around it, with single condoms going for $200 — and shows the largescale reaction of the people against the mandate, which is enforced via internal bio-censors.

And "One Night Only" treats its whole "Sex Purge" not as the A-plot but the B-plot, so that Owen and Allie can go on their respective journeys and eventually find their way to each other against the backdrop of the glum dystopia.

Meanwhile, Gluck — who casts familiar faces in just about every speaking role in the film, and even lands a couple of cameos from his "Anyone But You" co-stars — is having too much fun to get bogged down in plot stickiness.

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This is a sexually frank, R-rated world he's inhabiting, and the movie admittedly takes a bit of time to find its footing. But it eventually finds the right mixture of sexy and sweet, of breaking rom-com rules and abiding by them, and Gluck lets his two stars shine.

Turner is saddled with a New York accent no one will buy for a single second, but otherwise he's a charmer, and Barbaro is electric. Their chemistry sizzles, and the world around them — as well as the ticking clock they're up against — frames their story and gives them stakes to rise above.

"One Night Only" is not an overtly political film, but it's not not a political film, and it uses its vague political underpinnings to highlight the exhaustion we all feel inside our current reality. That it's able to have fun with its premise and lightly gloss over its specifics is a credit to its particular sense of worldbuilding, and the anxiety of our times. Even a journey into a world where sex is outlawed counts as an escape from our own.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'One Night Only'

GRADE: B

Rated R: for sexual material, language and brief nudity

Running time: 102 minutes

In theaters

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