Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner's One Night Only offers a clever, albeit forgettable, reworking of familiar rom-com tropes. While the rom-com genre often struggles with stale ideas, this film finds a balance between cliche and original. The film may not reinvent the wheel, but it delivers a breezy, charming story about two strangers forging a connection beyond a mere hookup. The premise is wild, to say the least.

Allie (Barbaro) and Owen (Turner) are broken individuals struggling with relationship issues. They live in an imaginary New York where sex between unmarried people is permissible only on one night of the year. The mandate has driven society to a desperate frenzy, making sexual predators out of normal people—much like how prolonged starvation turns civilians into cannibals. Each of the inhabitants has a genetic tattoo on their wrist that alerts them of the mandated hours and penalises anyone who breaks the law. This environment fosters crude behaviour, leading characters to make the type of objectifying comments they would normally suppress. For Allie, Owen is not handsome enough for a one-night stand because he has “elephant ears”. On the other hand, Owen mocks Allie’s legs, even though he harbours feelings for her right from the start.

Director: Will Gluck

Cast: Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner

The rest of the story practically writes itself. Owen and Allie bump into each other time and again in New York, and they soon start to realise that there is more to a relationship than physical intimacy. The writing is so flimsy that this truth occurs to them as a spur-of-the-moment thought, making you wonder where and how they have suddenly developed a conscience after showing few signs of being different from the ‘sexual cannibals' around them. This shift builds on the classic rom-com trope where a character suddenly realises that they are in love but without any of the groundwork. Here, the serendipitous angle is charming, but it does not feel earned and poetic, as it often does in quality rom-com films. 

This narrative issue points to a larger flaw: the setting itself. Would being deprived of sex for a year make people behave in such uncivilised and uninhibited ways as the characters do here? Maybe it is possible in a cinematic sense, but the film never quite sells the premise convincingly. It feels more like a gimmicky excuse to have more sex sequences in the narrative. In some bizarre moments, even a teenager makes sexually suggestive remarks to Barbaro's character. This has little purpose in the story other than to elicit a cheap laughter from the audience. The film also assumes a level of desperation in society that is so extreme that every character runs around like a headless chicken for sex, bereft of dignity.

Even in the absence of the bizarre premise, the pleasures of One Night Only are no different from those of any standard-issue rom-com. Turner and Barbaro dial up the charms considerably, carrying the film with their magnetic chemistry while making you overlook the hollowness and the cracks in the story, at least for a while. It is in the simple exchanges where the film truly comes to life, such as when Owen shares pizza with Allie and has a moment of reckoning. A callback to Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's An Affair to Remember only adds to the gleefulness of the story. The core message—that genuine connection outlasts physical intimacy—is thoughtful, and the film delivers it in an unpreachy manner. You just wish it belonged in a smarter, more poignant film. Similar to having sex, the pleasure of viewing the film is transient.