One Night Only is an uncomfortably fascist rom-com – but I liked it

Callum Turner’s new film One Night Only has an alarmingly fascist premise, which bans premarital sex and is rather at odds with the giddy, often slapstick approach the film generally takes.

It’s frankly disturbing to imagine living in a world where hook-ups are over and every relationship is puritanically unconsummated until after wedded bliss for… reasons that create this Purge-esque rom-com – but with sex not serial killing.

The act is illegal for singles, with everyone sporting a red tattoo that only turns green for sex after you tie the knot or on this one night each year.

However, for all its flaws (queer relationships are quickly ducked around with a catch-all ‘we’ve been skirting your laws since before the Bible’, which apparently forgives the film including any) there is enjoyment in One Night Only and its messiness.

Easy A director Will Gluck is a safe pair of hands at the helm, while Turner and his co-star Monica Barbaro spark off each other well and are gamely committed to the silliness.

I don’t see a world in which this becomes a rom-com staple by any stretch of this imagination, but there is a certain quality – perhaps it’s just the chaos – that gives it repeat watchability though.

Three years into the casual sex ban and the ‘special’ night has come around again, with singles giddy at the prospect of getting their rocks off with quite desperate excitement.

Pizza parlour owner Owen (Turner) though is ready to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) over a special dinner, but she has sex on the mind – and not with him.

Meanwhile the romantic Ali (A Complete Unknown Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro), a jingle singer, is still hoping to somehow hunt down a proper connection in this dating hellscape. However, she gets abandoned by her pal just minutes after they vow to take their time that night, when said friend encounters a prince from Sierra Leone in line for the toilet.

Owen and Ali’s meet-cute is, entertainingly, anything but, with him vomiting on the pavement after eating both meals at his proposal dinner. The film then does well to keep up the will-they-won’t-they tension as they flit across the city on separate – but often colliding – tracks.

Various scrapes allow both Barbaro and Turner to show off their comedy chops, from a heist to bag the last remaining condom to Owen testing out a rubber glove as an alternative. Both of them also get caught with their pants down too, literally.

In fact, the myriad moments of cringe often get too close for comfort when it comes to the vulnerability of all these intimate situations, although they provide some of the film’s most memorable – and sadly, relatable – scenes.

One Night Only is also fun and self-aware with its raft of cameos that drop in during this feral 12-hour period, from Julia Fox to Pete Davidson – and a very funny joke about the guy with whom Owen’s ex is planning to use her legal window.

While it would be hard to swoon at much of anything in the romance part of this rom-com with such a grim central conceit, there is a little moment between Owen and Ali that deserves to become rom-com reference lore.

Wearing a plunging halter neck dress her flatmate forced her into, when they end up at Owen’s pizza place and he notices her rub her neck briefly, he wordlessly hands her a staff T-shirt. That one small gesture saved One Night Only for me. And it also makes up for a bit of a fumbled ending.

One Night Only is in UK cinemas from today.

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