One Night Only - Review

By: [email protected] on
Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers is possibly one of the most incisive satires ever produced by a Hollywood studio. The film, nominally an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s novel of the same name, follows a group of blandly attractive high school graduates as they enter the military to fight an alien species known as the arachnids. The fun and energetic, over-the-top action sequences, along with soap-opera melodrama, are punctuated by propaganda news broadcasts depicting this militaristic society.
 
Near the end of the movie, Neil Patrick Harris enters wearing a Nazi SS Officer’s uniform. And your first reaction is to laugh, because it’s silly and Harris looks silly wearing it, but then the laugh dies in your throat. You start working your way backwards through the film and realize that this entire time you’ve been rooting for fascists. The film turns its camera on the audience and basically says that you are the bad guys. Like all good satire, it makes the audience uncomfortable and laugh nervously. I think One Night Only is trying to do for romantic comedies what Starship Troopers was doing with sci-fi action. The film gestures to a Starship Troopers-esque movie, but the story is so incurious about its own premise that instead of being a savage indictment of Right-Wing purity culture, it loops around and almost falls into fascist apologia.
 
So, three years ago, the “Chastity Mandate” law was put into place, outlawing premarital sex except for one night a year. So, if you are single, you are legally allowed to have all the sex you want for 12 hours one night a year. How did this law get enacted? How did society change because of it? Why did it not lead to sectarian violence? Why did the presumably right-wing government allow a half measure like this to go? These are questions for a different movie and ones that this film does not care about. Anywho, every non-married person has an RFID chip tattoo put on their body which uses biometrics to determine if you’re having intercourse before the annual day. Elevator pitch: it’s The Purge but with premarital sex. Any further questions you have about this can just be ignored.
 
The story follows two romantics during the 12-hour period while the exemption is in effect. Pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) plans not only to sleep with his girlfriend Mallica (Maya Hawke) but also propose to her. Mallica, on the other hand, wants to sleep with someone else and breaks up with him during the exemption. While singer Allie (Monica Barbaro) just wants to sleep with someone she actually likes. Through a series of crazy coincidences, Allie and Owen keep running into each other as they try to find someone they can sleep with. Can these two find love during the one night a year no one is actually looking for it? Hell, can they even find a condom when everywhere is either sold out or charging absurd prices? Can you, gentle reader, guess where this movie is going?
The most frustrating thing about One Night Only is that, as part of the “one crazy night” rom-com subgenre? It’s actually pretty good! Turner and Barbaro are attractive, charming people running through amusing crazy situations. Their dialogue is witty, and there’s an effortless charm to their scenes – which is kind of all you want in a romantic comedy. The side characters are all fun and quirky; Molly Ringwald as Owen’s mom and LeVar Burton as her lover are particular highlights here. Will Gluck’s direction is confident and fun.
 
But One Night Only’s fatal flaw is its premise. Because while the pretty charming people are dealing with the shenanigans of trying to sleep with someone before the time runs out, in the back of your mind a little alarm is going off saying “these people’s rights have been stripped away.” And what you end up with is a comedy about how hilarious it would be if anti-sodomy laws returned. What’s worse is that the film never engages with its own premise about suppression or waiting to have sex. A better film would explore these questions; instead, the premise is mostly used for comic set pieces about how difficult it would be to get a condom during these 12 hours. And I have to stress, these sequences are funny, but I wanted the film to go deeper into its themes. At a certain point, I realized that this movie would function just as well if it was set during New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day, and didn’t need this high concept gloss to sell a mostly charming (if rote) romantic comedy.
 
One Night Only is about two pretty people who ultimately don’t care about the fascist takeover of their country; they’ve got each other, and isn’t that enough? Somehow this bright poppy version of a dystopia makes me feel more depressed than it would if it fully engaged with its premise. Is that the ultimate irony? Is that what the film was going for? Maybe one day someone will craft the hot take that this film is all a subversion. Perhaps, but all I see is a missed opportunity.
 
Two out of Four Stars