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Dating is hard. The modern world has taken this eternal truism and exacerbated it in a sea of apps and swipes—a digital marketplace often stripped of that ephemeral thing old souls call romance. Hell, it’s even hard getting a decent rom-com these days.
Which might be what makes One Night Only cleverer than it has any right to be. Like Will Gluck’s Anyone But You rom-com of a few years ago, here is a somewhat blue love story featuring up-and-coming talent, including one of the supporting pilots from Top Gun: Maverick. Yet unlike Anyone But You, the film’s leads have genuine chemistry and are working from a script that essentially pioneers a depressingly plausible premise for a dystopian view of an America about three clicks removed from the fall of Roe v. Wade and the manosphere’s ascent. What’s most surprising, then, is how this potentially terrifying parable is used as the backdrop for a relatively charming love story—or at the very least a winsome evening of foreplay.
Set in a not-too-distant future where vaguely alluded to “elected officials” have decreed via government mandate that all forms of premarital sex are now a felony—complete with biomedical chips in everyone’s wrists, a la SpaceX chastity belts— it’s a hellscape equal parts Fox News and The Purge. This drills all the way down to the fact that on only one night of the year, single people are allowed to, ahem, explore their options and indulge the new shorthand for the frisky holiday. “Swipe right” has become “mandate me!”
It should be a nightmare, but it also is a high enough concept to raise the stakes of romance to, if not life or death, then a rat race to avoid the new definition of “holiday blues.” Suddenly everyone is off the apps and in the human arena again, but they’re still fighting a ticking clock at the singles bar like Katniss Everdeen making a mad dash to the Hunger Games’ weapons depot.
It’s in this race we meet Owen and Allie (Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro), two young people whose quest through Manhattan’s nightlife scene is interrupted time and again by the other’s presence. For his part, Owen had no intention to be spending his night out. Alas, his longtime girlfriend (Maya Hawke) waited until this very evening to announce she wants to explore alternatives around town. And their apartment. Meanwhile Allie is the traditional unlucky-in-love rom-com heroine who, despite spectacularly filling out a club-ready dress that her bestie (Sydney Cole Alexander) picked, is deeply insecure about being seen in it. Left to wing the night solo, Allie has reasons to be turned off by Turner’s aw-shucks pizza parlor owner… but he does look like Callum Turner, so you probably know how this is going to go.
The movie benefits immeasurably by the easygoing energy and warm sense of give-and-take between these two leads. While Gluck’s previous Anyone But You benefitted commercially from the current star wattage of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, Barbaro and Turner’s romance is breezier and far more natural. Their flirtations and exasperations with one another as they keep waylaying the best laid plans go a long way of papering over the problems inherent in Travis Braun’s screenplay.
While the script itself is fairly ingenious in its worldbuilding, spending more real estate than you might expect showing how this premarital sex ban is policed, monitored, and enforced, as well as how it’s created yet further quirks and hang-ups among a generation supposedly allergic to sex, by virtue of its premise, the film is far more about the sensual than the emotional. Allie and Owen’s curiosity feel genuine, but it never quite achieves the grand romantic rush of its aspirations or influences.
The movie wears those touchstones on its sleeve, though, nostalgically recalling 2000s era rom-coms in particular since Allie is introduced as being an out-of-work singer who gigs by doing covers of Natasha Beddingfield’s “Unwritten” for a drug commercial. Later needle drops include Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and the slightly more retro “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes. All of them remind of an era where the rom-com was plentiful, and Hollywood romance between preternaturally good-looking people was as common as car chases and machetes.
And it works better than a mere gimmick here since Barbaro has a lovely singing voice, as revealed when she played Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. Her vocalizations are similarly disarming in a shameless bit of plotting where it’s revealed Allie fears performing in front of people on stage. So guess what a pivotal moment in act two involves?
One Night Only is certainly unafraid of playing the hits, sometimes literally, but there’s something cozy about its half-forgotten familiarity. There remains a bit of the therapeutic as well. While Allie and Owen’s love story is not one for the ages, their eventual meet up at his pizza joint, after each has had their share of failed sex farce misadventures, is tender and wry. Whether it’s the vibes of buddies or soulmates we’ll leave to you to deduce, but it achieves an unlikely grace in the face of its bizarre premise.
So often dystopian parables are about the pain and anguish of living under the yoke of tyranny and oppression. Rightfully, it is the nightmare of anyone supportive of a liberal democracy. Yet likely because those ideals have been corroded so much in real-life over the past decade, One Night Only focuses on the interpersonal, self-care of the equation. Even in a perverse reality a few miles down the river like this movie, there can still be moments of lightness, humanity. Life. In the rom-com’s greatest heyday between the 1980s and 2000s, so many of these elevated high concept fantasies were about restoring a sense of happily ever after. In a far different context, One Night Only suggests chasing bliss, if even for a moment, with frothy abandon is an end unto itself. Whether or not that’s the definition of high romance remains debatable, but it is more than life-affirming enough in these times to be worth a summer night out.
One Night Only opens on Aug. 7.
The post One Night Only Review: Dystopia with a Happy Ending appeared first on Den of Geek.
