I don’t think the words “a very First Things sex comedy” have ever appeared in this world, but they do in Patrick T. Brown’s review there of the current film “One Night Only”, so of course I had to go see it last night. It’s the most subversively conservative sex comedy since “The Forty Year Old Virgin”. I only wish I had seen it with one or more unattached Zoomers and single Millennials, to see what they thought of it. Here’s the trailer:
The film is set in New York City in the near future. A conservative government has banned premarital sex, except for one night each year. It enforces the law by installing biometric chips into all people — chips that register whether one is married or not. The chips monitor hormone levels, and can tell if unmarrieds are having sex. If so, it automatically alerts the police. A silly premise, but you go with it, because the point of the movie is to explore what sex means to single people when it is heavily restricted.
“One Night Only” opens in the hour just before the hallowed One Night. Owen (Callum Turner) is a pizzeria owner who can’t wait to meet his girlfriend for dinner. He plans to propose marriage to her. But when they sit down at the table, she tells him that she’s going to use the One Night to test-drive somebody else. He is crushed, but can’t wallow in his self-pity, because he has to hustle to find a hook-up before the one-year, government-imposed sex drought returns at daylight.
Meanwhile, Ali (Monica Barbaro), an unhappily single woman, prepares for the big night, hoping to hook up with a good guy. What happens then is a series of misadventures that lead to several meet-cutes between the two; that the movie will end with them finally getting together is never really in question, but it’s pretty funny to see all that they have to endure to get to that point.
The movie can be somewhat raunchy, admittedly, but to this viewer, its raunchiness serves its subversive points: 1) that sex is, well, sexier when it isn’t freely available, and 2) a world of sexual free-for-all works against romance, and getting to know one’s partner well before crossing that line. “One Night Only” is not at all prudish, but its depiction of lust unbound on the big night makes commitment-free sex seem animalistic and inhuman, though in a funny way that doesn’t sound Church Lady-ish. I won’t tell you how it ends, but Patrick T. Brown’s point in his review is accurate:
When you remove all the barriers that once socially hemmed in young people’s freedom, you also take down the guardrails that guided them to meet, date, and mate. At a time when a growing number of voices—including in Hollywood—are realizing that a society without signposts doesn’t lead to more freedom but to more anxiety and neurosis,
One Night Onlysuggests that voluntary restrictions on our sexual freedoms may end up leading to more happy endings after all.
Again, this movie is not a Sunday School lesson, and it really does have some mild raunch that will be off-putting to some readers of this newsletter. Nevertheless, “One Night Only” is a movie that gripes about the tech-imposed chastity (think Covid mask restrictions, but for sex, and enforced by a digitally-powered government), but also reveals the emptiness and dehumanization of the swipe-right free-for-all that currently exists. It’s a funny movie that backhandedly makes a case for romance, and waiting to cross the sex line. It’s a film that, while fuming about the “fascists” who imposed chastity on America, actually makes a sly case for re-humanizing courtship. You don’t expect to see that in theaters in 2026.
The film’s screenwriter, Travis Braun, is 36 years old. I wonder if he’s trying to say something about his generation.
