The new romantic comedy One Night Only has the internet in a tizzy, and not over the radioactive hotness of its stars Monica Barbaro (scene-stealing Oscar nominee for A Complete Unknown) and Callum Turner (Mr. Dua Lipa). Rather, it’s a somewhat less complimentary tizzy over the movie’s premise, a concept so high it may be suffering from oxygen deprivation. You know the horror movie series The Purge, set in a near-future United States where one day a year, all crime is legal for 24 hours? This is that, but for premarital sex. Ah, you might say, but premarital sex is already legal. What this movie presupposes is: What if it isn’t?
Well, that would raise a lot of questions, which are being gleefully asked on social media and in group chats. (My wife’s has taken to calling the movie The Fucking Purge, which for my money beats the Sex Purge shorthand going around my social feeds.) The movie answers some of these questions, fudges others, and raises plenty of further confusion when it gets into the nitty-gritty of how and why this anti-sex law is enforced. But what makes the movie worth discussing is not really its world-building, which is alternately cleverly blasé and eye-rollingly screenwriter-brained. It’s more the fact that it brings sex to the forefront of the romantic comedy, in a way that appears to be grappling with how that fact of life fits into this specific genre in 2026.
That’s probably a loft-sounding claim for a movie by Will Gluck, a seeming pop-culture sponge who specializes in near-obsessive, sometimes-exhausting self-referentiality, whether indulged in the Emma Stone star vehicle Easy A, a pair of half-cute, half-smarmy Peter Rabbit adventures, or a remake of Annie. But while Easy A is about as squeakily sexless as a teen movie about promiscuity (or at least the impression of it) could possibly be, Gluck’s signature romantic comedies do indeed emphasize a certain body-forward cheerfulness, even if they ultimately defer to nudity clauses. Friends with Benefits features Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake performing athletic feats of sexuality while insisting that they’re just good pals looking for release, while the less obviously bawdy Anyone But You is the rare rom-com to feature actual star-driven sex scenes amidst its loose take on Shakespeare.
Nudity-wise, One Night Only steps back to Friends with Benefits levels: Lots of skin, lots of strategic barely-covering, lots of gags about the cartoon-porn casualness of it all rather than submitting to any real eroticism. Thematically, though, it’s the most sex-centric Gluck movie yet, following Owen (Turner) and Allie (Barbaro) during the annual 12-hour period where single people are allowed to legally bone. Owen has been recently ditched by the woman he hoped to make his wife (and therefore have sex with a third or fourth time, and potentially many more!), while Allie is just doing her best in the style of Olivia Rodrigo, hitting the sex purge like a single girl at a Vegas bar, rocking her minidress with a vodka-cran (or spiritual equivalent) and an open heart.
Owen and Allie are both nominally searching for a hook-up on a day half-cleverly framed as a speed-run equivalent of Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve – the kind of holiday that inspires sexual desperation even (or maybe especially) if you try to deny it. Accordingly, the New York City around them, real locations filled out with agreeable caricatures, is a frenzy of hook-ups, like a fuck-happy version of the unwatchable Garry Marshall ensemble rom-coms bearing those holiday names.
The hotties’ hearts aren’t truly in it – especially not Allie, given that Owen has the mild motivation of tit-for-tat revenge sex. So why do they persist at all, rather than waiting it out and scouting for those elusive genuine connections to be mined on the next sex purge? The answer is clear: They’re doing it for the plot. This is how One Night Only enters the sex-scene discourse. (So, not with a bang, then.)
Gluck never directly refers to the phenom of youngs posting prudishly about the lack of need for sex scenes in film (or, possibly, life). By its nature, that’s more of an online-skewing thing, and for all of his shameless pop-culture-mongering, Gluck favors more mainstream, borderline monocultural touchstones: Annoyingly ubiquitous pop songs (a subject touched in all of his rom-coms, given a funny Big Pharma twist here), lazy couch-surfing watches (he shouts out Tubi here with a cheesy-looking cop show), and, his favorite, rom-coms that are hyper-aware that other rom-coms exist. But intentionally or not, his interest in the latter means that his movie evokes debates about on-screen sex – which here tends to be a background gag, with plenty of unconvincingly overzealous day players passionately making out on the subway or baring their backs or ankles to open windows. In other words, sex scenes are perpetually happening somewhere else, just out of reach; Allie and Owen spend most of the movie wandering or hustling through the city, together and apart, chasing a “connection” (and also sex; they’re not made of stone), sometimes going so far as to strip down to nearly nothing before their desires are inevitably thwarted. There’s a Looney Tunes-meets-American Pie quality to their bumbling that makes the movie knockabout fun despite the dual handicaps of predictability and, more notably, taking place within draconian bounds of fascist overreach.
That’s part of the point, of course. Most people onscreen seem to resent the law banning premarital sex, of which these 12 hours are, per dialogue, a compromise carve-out, a sly satire of party-unaffiliated but very clearly Mainstream Democrat “resistance” slash capitulation. But those same people are also mostly attempting to live their lives rather than start tossing firebombs over the freer sex they might not get to have anyway. There’s even the slightest hint that by concentrating premarital relations to this one period, it’s making things a little “easier” on some portion of an overtaxed population, knowing that a whole mess of fellow horny dopes will be just as hot to go as they are for a brief shining moment. (I’m reminded of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy proposing a Klingon schedule of once-every-seven-years mating for Springfield: “For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much much more.”)
Maybe that’s a filmmaker’s ultimate excuse, constructing a situation where it’s the government insisting that sex should only happen for the plot, in this case marriage and family. In this world, the sexlessness of the average modern rom-com has become legally enforced, and so an After Hours-meets-The Handmaid’s Tale scenario must conform to the shape of genre conventions. Gluck seems to have a love-hate relationship with those tropes that parallels the sentiment in One Night Only: He has repeatedly fun of their corniness (not unlike the people with “fuck the mandate” signs in their windows in the movie) as a prelude to eventually indulging them. Hardly anyone in One Night Only seems to conscientiously object to this 12-hour free-for-all; people are seen sitting it out for money or work, not disgust or disinterest. In that sense, the fucking purge has a better hit rate than New Year’s.
Yet even one sweeping mandate isn’t enough for Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun, who introduce another restriction: the semi-nonsensical idea that all of this premarital sex is also required to use protection, which neither squares with the big-picture sense that this is conservative “pro-family” morality run amok nor the smaller details of how this is all monitored. (Biometric implants combined with marriage registration info will alert the cops about non-married sexual contact, OK, whatever, but can they really detect condom use, which is the only protection anyone in the movie seems to rate? I guess this will be the true proving ground for Trojan UltraThins or whatever.) It also strengthens the movie’s mild COVID undertones, combining the frenzy of post-lockdown desperation to reclaim real life with the mid-pandemic scramble for PPE.
Of course, this protection rule is actually mainly For the Plot: It’s easier for nuclear-grade hotties like Barbaro and Turner to fumble the sexual bag if they have another requirement working against them. The movie does not actually want them to have sex with other people, even as it’s engineered a situation where a relationship immediately following unrelated sexual dalliances wouldn’t just be acceptable but pretty logical.
It would be easy, then, to classify One Night Only as sex-negative – plenty of reviews already filed to that effect – because it’s a movie on the side of the plot, where sex can serve as a series of passing sight gags but not the makings of a sustained connection, much less something fun to do without one. Connections, in this telling, are only the province of soul-searching conversations, rarely a physical syncing of naked bodies. As if to emphasize this elusiveness, both the stars get into naked-ish situations where they’re forced to flee in modesty, a carve-out compromise for the movie itself where sex isn’t barred entirely, so long as it’s not serious enough to make a perceived audience of prudes uncomfortable.
On the other hand: It’s hard to make a romantic comedy with ample sex scenes because they’re consummation, and a lot of rom-com mechanics delay that for as long as possible. (Some of the most sexless entries imaginable still engage in a hiding-in-plain sight kink: cuteness edging.) Not all, of course; there are romantic comedies about married couples, or bed-hopping singles, or couples who sleep together halfway through the story – or earlier. One of this century’s best so far, Leslye Headland’s Sleeping with Other People, opens with the leads hooking up in college before they reconnect as friends years later. Still, much of the movie’s tension derives from their agreement that they won’t have sex again, and the movie gets plenty explicit in the meantime (if in talk more than deed).
A more recent film, literally released a week ago, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex has its highly mismatched couple throw into an S&M relationship with a quickness that disorients its younger, less experienced participant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), though his problems don’t really start until he catches feelings for his domme Erika (Olivia Wilde). For all the movie’s playful frankness about what these two are doing together, it’s not really more visually explicit than One Night Only. Its most detailed sex scenes are also abortive, like a threesome that goes off the rails when Elliot senses the heaviness of Erika’s manipulative hand. The movie has also been scolded, for Araki supposedly lecturing younger audiences about taking risks, sexual or otherwise, though to buy that requires an assumption that Araki identifies purely and uncomplicatedly with Wilde’s charismatic, manipulative, mercurial, self-involved artiste — or that scolding the movie is preferable to the movie lightly teasing you. Seems to me Araki shares some self-referentiality with Gluck, too, and I think for some people, scolding must be a vital part of foreplay.
Philosophically, I Want Your Sex is more forward-thinking and probably healthier than One Night Only simply because it figures and accepts sex more directly into the process of putting yourself out there in search of some form of connection. By emphasizing the light-banter ease with which Allie and Owen are able to circle each other, the sexy-wary ratio played expertly by Turner and especially Barbaro, One Night Only can’t help but define sex as a the workmanlike middle between “the before” and “the after” that the leads cite as their respective favorite parts. (It’s around this time that you may start to wonder if either Allie or Owen has had an orgasm. Again, why go out on this night if you’re chasing the before and/or after? The whole rest of the year is one or the other!) Yet the art world of Araki’s movie is scarcely less fanciful in its brightly colored sexual playground, and it ends on a connection that turns out to be as mental as it is physical, suggesting that certain relationships are destined to fuck with your head, and taking a kind of mischievous pleasure in that truth. Marriage may be a surreal nightmare from which its two lead characters awake, sweaty and jarred, yet there’s a kind of resistant-yet-resilient wistfulness there, too.
One Night Only doesn’t want to come across so square as to suggest wedding bells as a romantically leaned-in solution to dystopian legislation, despite the fact that quickier marriages would certainly proliferate however they could in such a situation. You can see how this neither-here-nor-there, neither-before-nor-after approach might look an awful lot like simply concluding that, rather than exclusively for marriage, sex is simply best deployed as part of a long-term relationship. Or, if you will, at the end of a movie, always, always, For the Plot. Is this a spoiler? I don’t think so, because I am describing the end of most romantic comedies, when you get down to it.
And One Night Only is a pretty good romantic comedy, by my reckoning. As misguided as the mildly futuristic dystopia might seem as the engine for some feel-good laughs and swoons, it does lead to more frame-filling sight gags (and, speaking of gagging, world-building) than usual for this type of thing. To the degree that I’m not sure if I buy Callum Turner’s ongoing attempt to disguise his Britishness via that old standby, the mushy New York Guy accent, I am absolutely bankrupted by Monica Barbaro’s plucky single gal routine. The movie’s ambitions and old-fashioned small-c conservatism never feel fully resolved, and that’s what gives the movie some unexpected friction: The attempt, halfway between worthy challenge and self-own, at making a crowd-pleasing romance set in a time where it appears the populace has no reason for optimism, on a specific day where looking for love seems particularly stupid, frivolous, and/or impossible. One Night Only allows room for little hints of despair to seep into its high-concept silliness. Are Owen and Allie chasing sex scenes, or running away from them? They don’t seem entirely sure. That might make this movie the defining rom-com of its weird, broken era.
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