MOVIES: One Night Only (2026, Will Gluck)

Alternate titles: The Sex Purge; After Hours: Fascism Edition.

Opening titles tell us that three years ago, the Mandate was panned, banning premarital sex. All Americans now wear implanted wrist monitors that measure vital signs and hormone levels; whenever two people are in the same place and their levels both spike in just the right technobabbly way, the sex police are alerted and sent out to make an arrest. But for one night every year, twelve glorious hours, the Mandate is suspended and all of the singles get to go wild and fuck like rabbits. This movie takes place on that night.

As the night begins, pizzeria owner Owen (Callum Turner) is planning to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in a role so underwritten that I didn't know the character had a name until I checked IMDB), who cuts him off by announcing that this year, she thinks they should screw other people. That sets Owen off on his quest for Ms. Right Now, during which he keeps running into Allie (Monica Barbaro), a studio singer whose career is made up almost entirely of singing old pop songs that have been rewritten as pharmaceutical jingles. (That's a pretty good running joke; sadly, it's the best one you're going to get.)

Allie and Owen keep running into one another as increasingly contrived circumstances keep them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, and we cut back and forth between the two as they have a long series of pathetic/desperate/ostensibly comic encounters with potential sexual partners.

Considered only as a rom-com, this is a B-minus at best. Barbaro is charming, and I look forward to seeing her in better movies, but as hard as she's working, she does not have the power to singlehandedly drag any personality out of Callum Turner, who has all the warmth and charisma of a used bar of soap. The supporting cast is poorly used; they're unkindly used in some cases, notably Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, playing Owen's mother and her boyfriend, who are trotted out for a few "old people have sex? Eww, gross!" jokes.

But we can't consider this solely as a rom-com, because its premise is so preposterous, and because the movie refuses to deal with what the world would actually look like if the Mandate had been posed. Some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the movie:

• Where are the anti-Mandate protests? If the government banned premarital sex, there would be riots in the street that would make January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. And they wouldn't stop after a week or two, either. They'd still be going on, even three years later. This movie gives us a few listless chants of "fuck the mandate," an occasional bit of graffiti, and some halfhearted "Repeal" signs in windows. (Those signs are in the exact shades of blue and pink that are now associated with the trans rights movement, which is oddly distracting.)
• This movie takes place in a future near enough to be essentially our present, so I assume that it's our current right-wingers who have passed the Mandate. And the current sexual obsession of the right wing (at least as far as heterosexuals are concerned) is decreasing birth rates; they wouldn't be imposing restrictions that are going to decrease the number of pregnancies.
• We're supposed to believe that the federal government was able to install wrist monitors in every American in only three years? The government can't do anything that efficiently. And given the massive freakouts at the thought of getting a COVID vaccine, you think everyone's going to line up peacefully to have a piece of machinery implanted?
• How many people are required to monitor everyone's monitors for signs of unlawful sex, and how many new police officers had to be hired to make those arrests? And honestly, given typical police response times, you could probably get in a quickie and be out the door for brunch before the cops get there.
• There's a scene fairly early in the movie in which characters are trying to buy a condom (Oh right, condoms are mandated, too, which raises another whole batch of questions...), and all of the stores are sold out. On free sex night? The one night when you know there's going to be a huge demand for condoms, and none of the stores have stocked up with enough condoms to get them through the night? And it's not like this scene is at 6:45 am, when the clock is about to run out; it's pre-midnight, with hours to go yet.
• What about tourists, visiting the US from other countries? Surely the government isn't installing these expensive high-tech gizmos in every visitor. Every tourist is an opportunity for unmonitored sex. They're going to be the most popular people at every singles bar in the country. (They're also likely to be the victims of a vastly increased amount of rape and sexual assault.)

But even more than its minimization of its own enormous premise, what really drags the movie down is how conservative and anti-sex it ultimately is. Every attempt that either Owen or Allie does make to have sex goes horribly wrong, usually in humiliating fashion.; we don't actually see anyone in this movie having a happy night of sex. (Ringwald and Burton are as close as we get; they do seem to be enjoying themselves, but in ways that make them the butt of the joke.) We hear more than one character suggest that the pro-Mandate folks were right, and everyone really is better off waiting until marriage. Supporting characters are depicted as crass, disgusting lechers for being eager to have sex on the one night they're allowed ot do so.

It's anti-romance and it's not very funny. By my count, that makes it a flop on both halves of rom-com. Avoid at all costs.