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PHOTO: Callum Turner, left, and Monica Barbaro attend the premiere of One Night Only at the SVA Theatre on Monday, Aug. 3, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
This article represents the writer’s opinions and contains spoilers for the film One Night Only.
Sept. 8, right after Labor Day, One Night Only, the anticipated rom-com of the summer, became available at home through video-on-demand. The film premiered in theaters Aug. 7 and flopped at the box office, earning $24 million worldwide on a $25 million production budget, according to film industry data site, The Numbers. Set in a fictional New York City, the movie follows Allie (played by Monica Barbaro) and Owen (played by Callum Turner) as they fight tooth and nail for a chance to hook up. Why? Our main characters live in a society where premarital sex is not simply frowned upon, but illegal outside of one fateful night (essentially The Purge but sex instead of crime). It’s an interesting concept on its face but what One Night Only did with it failed to meet my expectations and fell short of offering social commentary on censorship, reproductive rights and the right to love freely.
As expected with this premise, single people across the city go wild, jumping at the chance to get freaky even with strangers, but Allie and Owen have their own agendas. Owen wants to have sex with his long term girlfriend and roommate, Malika (played by Maya Hawke). However, Malika, to Owen’s surprise, is determined to have sex with their upstairs neighbor, although it’s unclear whether she and Owen are fully broken up.
Devastated, Owen seeks casual sex. Meanwhile, Allie, a lonely commercial songwriter, is looking for love, not just sex. The film shows Owen and Allie navigating the night, seeking out strangers. It amounts to a quest for a condom, time at a jail and a hospital visit. Through failed hookup after failed hookup, the two rather predictably start to fall for each other.
At the end of the film, Allie and Owen meet at a lighthouse, which has sentimental meaning for Allie, with only an hour remaining of the mandate. Instead of having sex, the two decide to get to know each other more. They spend the next year dating and have sex on the one day they can.
Of course the movie is unrealistic in the sense that sex is essentially completely outlawed, but director Will Gluck takes it to the next level of incredibility. At one point in the movie, both Allie and Owen fight for a condom kept in a glass case held by a statue. Allie gets a rope and ties it to a motorcycle driven by a potential suitor to steal it from the corner store. By the way, this is the last condom in the city and priced at $200. Even more ridiculous is when Allie performs Yaz’s “Only You” in front of her singing idol, Ezra (played by Charlie Gillespie). Despite the way she clutches the mic the entire time, he finds her intriguing and almost has sex with her before ending up in a hospital.
One Night Only is filled with oversexualized campiness and deus ex machinas that miss the mark on what would have been a stronger commentary on the attack on our rights and freedom to love and the attack that American face everyday on our reproductive rights. Filled with cringey humor, viewers could interpret Allie and Owen’s decision to wait as respect for one another, but the message it sends is that promiscuity is in fact immoral.
Instead of placing more emphasis on America’s war against gay and trans folx, the film looks almost exclusively at white, heteronormative relationships. One Night Only could have gone deeper into the meaning of the sex censors depicted, commenting on today’s surveillance culture (ahem – Flock cameras). Rather than make efficient commentary, it chose to make light of a serious issue regarding American’s right to privacy. All this said, this movie was so absurd that it almost isn’t worth wondering what the intended message is.
