One Night Only (2026)
The United States has declared that sex outside of marriage is only legal for one night a year in the new film One Night Only, which plays almost like a rom-com version of The Purge.
Callum Turner plays Owen, a New York pizza shop proprietor excited about the prospect of a romantic evening with his girlfriend (Maya Hawke); however, the girlfriend drops a bomb on him when she says she wants to have sex with someone else that night. So Owen sets off to find someone. Allie (Monica Barbaro), a commercial jingle singer, is also looking.
Owen and Allie have a meet-cute that goes spectacularly wrong. Then, they encounter a series of escalating obstacles to their efforts to find someone to sleep with. Turner and Barbaro have decent chemistry and some of their failed attempts at finding a partner get laughs. Director Will Gluck (Easy A, Anyone But You) keeps the film zipping along.
The problem lies in the fact that the movie seems uninterested in exploring the full implications of living in a fascist, dystopian world where extra-marital sex is outlawed 364 days a year. The structure also gets a bit repetitive. Basically, most of the film is: Owen/Allie meets a potential partner, it goes horribly wrong, and this process repeats over and over again. It gets wearying near the end.
Rom-coms had lately
seemed like they were on life support, and it is nice to see both this and Finding
Emily being released. One Night Only may not be a classic, but it's
good that the genre hasn't gone fully extinct yet.
