One Night Only Is a Rare Rom-Com About Regulation

It’s not often that one finds a movie about federal regulation, much less a high-concept rom-com set in a quasi-dystopian alternate present that no one quite realizes is dystopian. But that’s what One Night Only is.

The movie is set in present-day New York, three years after the passage of a federal regulation, simply known as “the mandate,” that banned all sex outside of marriage—except for, you guessed it, one night only. During this one night, singles are free to have sex without the threat of legal crackdown; the rest of the time, they are monitored via implants that detect body chemistry and alert the police if shagging is detected. Basically, it’s The Purge: but for Sex. 

What seems to have bothered some critics is that this is a clearly authoritarian society in which private, personal decisions are monitored and criminalized, and most of the characters in the movie seem to go along with it, more or less. Sure, there are “repeal” signs hung in shops and apartment windows, and there’s anti-mandate graffiti sprayed on alley walls. There is even an anti-mandate rally planned for the night after the annual free-for-all, with a shaggy, handsome, anti-mandate male pop star who ends up playing a part in the movie’s proceedings. And there are repeat lawbreakers, who we encounter in a scene set in a police station. But by and large, the public takes the sexual prohibition for granted; meanwhile, brands capitalize on the special exemption evening, organizing special ad campaigns and products around the mandate’s strictures.

In other words, faced with a punitive legal crackdown on a personal decision, there’s token opposition, but mostly everyone shrugs, moves on with their life, and maybe tries to make a buck. 

Does this sound familiar? One only needs to look at the broad acceptance of the war on drugs to see this sort of exasperated acceptance of prohibition play out; compliance with COVID-19 mandates, especially in liberal outposts like New York City, also comes to mind. Yes, there were pockets of resistance and non-compliance, probably represented in the readership of this very piece. But large swaths of the public responded with little more than a grumble and a shrug. 

One Night Only posits that where sex is concerned, the public might do the same. That doesn’t mean the premise has no weaknesses: the most glaring is that the movie misses an opportunity to have a more robust black market of on-the-quick marriages and divorces. Since marital sex is legal in the movie’s rom-com dystopia, why aren’t people getting sham married for a night or two, or while they shack up? Wouldn’t this devalue marriage in ways that might be relevant for a rom-com?

And it’s hardly believable when some of the movie’s hijinks revolve around a condom shortage and resultant price gouging for a single remaining rubber; if, as the movie repeatedly suggests, brands are just building the mandate into their marketing and product decisions, shouldn’t protection, which is required by the law, be in abundant supply? 

But these premise-begging head-scratchers are mostly just a means to an end, a way to create complications for a pair of fated lovers to finally get together. Because yes, despite the inherent darkness of the premise—the movie actually takes time to show police enforcement of non-compliant sex, and even notes how it wastes policing resources—this is a rom-com. And it’s a reasonably charming, if imperfect, one at that. 

The pair in question are a singer, Allie (Monica Barbaro), who is stuck doing commercial ditties, and Owen (Callum Turner), a pizza shop owner with a model’s body and a taste for Buck Mason’s expensive-for-Instagram clothes (his relationship with the brand becomes a recurring joke). The pair have the requisite downtown meet-cute and love/hate tension, and the movie gives them increasingly absurd—even beyond the premise—comic reasons to stay apart, even as their flirty chemistry becomes harder and harder to deny. 

There is probably a weirder, darker, more scathing version of this movie more specifically targeted at Reason readers, given this magazine’s longstanding interest in personal liberty and regulatory overreach, perhaps set at the Department of Health and Human Services, which, based on the government signage that appears seemingly everywhere in the film’s fictional New York, is tasked with enforcing the rule. There might be a twisted satire about Congress working toward passage of the law, an episode handled in a single, amusing exchange between Owen’s mother and her boyfriend, who argue about it by shouting nearly every of-the-moment buzzword at each other. (If anything, the “law” aspect is where the movie’s concept really strains belief. This is a world in which…Congress passed an actual law?!) 

But this isn’t really a movie about regulatory crackdowns and legislative maneuvering. It’s just a quirky, high-concept romantic comedy, reasonably competent and, concept aside, perfectly formulaic. 

The question it asks is not: Is this the rise of fascism? Instead, it’s: Can two hot, charming, young adults find love and build a relationship in a world of casual authoritarianism and shocking crackdowns on personal liberty that no one treats as actually shocking? It’s a question worth pondering for more than one night.

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