When a movie gets bad reviews and appears to be bombing at the box office, I will frequently rush out to see it while it is still in theaters. After all, I may never get another chance to see it on a big screen and I’m intrigued to see if it is truly as bad as its detractors claim.
Read more The Ultimate Summer Vacation Glossary
The most recent film I did this for was One Night Only. I’m glad I did. Not because the film was good. It was watchable thanks to its attractive stars, but it was also fascinatingly bizarre and misguided. The film wants to be a sweet little confection, a simple fun night out at the movies, yet it raises all sorts of darker issues. It’s a film about societal norms and our collective willingness to bow to authority even when it is wrong. One Night Only is, in other words, a metaphor for the Covid lockdown.
This was apparently unintentional on the part of the filmmakers, since the movie has next to no interest in exploring the issues it raises. That very refusal to delve more deeply into the subject is itself telling: In the real world we still haven’t had a proper reckoning with what happened during the lockdown and why we all acquiesced to it so easily.
‘One Night Only’ reflects our confused times, when thanks to the Internet, erotica is more available than ever, yet younger generations are reportedly becoming withdrawn and having less sex.
One Night Only is a peculiar mixture of genres: On the one hand, the film is set in a grim sci-fi dystopia, an alternate reality where the federal government has banned premarital sex and has implanted everyone with monitoring devices to prevent them from breaking this rule. The prohibition is referred to in the film as the “mandate.” We’re told it happened because a “family values” political wave swept through Washington three years prior. Violators of the mandate are immediately tracked down and arrested. The country is a literal sex-obsessed police state.
The film is also a wacky, light-hearted rom-com. You see, the government allows one 12-hour period every year where the mandate is lifted and unmarried people can hook up with anyone they please. This exception was, we’re told, a “compromise” with moderate lawmakers to get it passed. This yearly event is treated as a major party.
One Night Only’s specific storyline is that on the night the mandate is briefly lifted, the established plans of the film’s heroine, Allie, (Monaco Barbaro) and the hero, Owen (Callum Turner), two regular 20-something New Yorkers, unexpectedly fizzle out. Our protagonists then meet for the first time by literally bumping into each other on the street, but a sudden bout of sushi-induced nausea by Owen undermines the moment. The characters then spend the rest of the movie separately having crazy adventures, both trying their darnedest to find somebody else to mess around with.
Throughout the night, they continually re-encounter each other, because that is something that would totally happen in a place as empty as New York City on the biggest party night of the year. Oh, when will our hero and heroine wake up and realize that they are the leads in a rom-com and therefore are fated to be together? Probably at some point late in the third act. Oops, spoiler!
Did I mention that on this, the one and only night in the year when strangers can screw around, there is also inexplicably a condom shortage? This creates a running gag where even when the protagonists do find someone to shag, they are forced into yet more hijinks to make that possible. Like Beavis and Butt-Head, they never score. If there was an Academy Award for “Most Contrived Screenplay” this film would win hands down.
While there’s a lot of running around and craziness, very little of it provides laughs. The funniest moments in the film are generated by, of all people, Star Trek’s LeVar Burton, who plays the horned-up boyfriend of Owen’s mother (Molly Ringwald!). Nor is the film that romantic. We know that the stars will get together eventually because the film sticks to the tropes of rom-coms but it takes almost its entire runtime for that to happen. The stars are separated for long stretches, making the film a lengthy and irritating tease.
Read more Lindsay Clancy, Motherhood, and a Culture That Has Forgotten Sacrifice
What is striking about One Night Only is how matter-of-factly it treats the underlying scenario. My guess is that the filmmakers were trying to come up with a novel premise for their rom-com, settled on, “What if there was only one night in the year where single people could have sex?” and worked backwards from there to establish the setting. They clearly didn’t think it through.
Even if you accept the premise that this mandate could pass, that that wouldn’t spark a massive repeal movement and that enforcement of it wouldn’t completely overwhelm the police, it is still difficult to see how it could be made to work in any practical sense. Other nations presumably wouldn’t have the same law. Surely people could just go on vacation to Canada, Mexico, or elsewhere and have as much sex as they want. The cruise ship industry in particular would likely see business go through the roof. (“This is your captain speaking. We are now in international waters. Go nuts, folks.”)
As I watched the film in the theater I thought it was absurd for those reasons. However, upon further thought, maybe I’m being too optimistic regarding my fellow Americans. We did recently go through a two-year period where people cowered in their homes because authorities told us, on dubious grounds, that doing so was for our own good. Not only did most people go along with it, but many shouted down the few who voiced dissent on the policy.
It’s not at all clear that the sheltering was effective at preventing spread of the disease, but it did do lasting harm to our physical and mental health as well as to our children’s education. We also now know that while authorities publicly insisted that the disease couldn’t have leaked from a lab, they privately suspected that it might have. Getting a full accounting of all of the decisions that were made ought to be a national obsession. Some are trying but most people seem to just want to forget that the whole thing ever happened.
This tracks with the way the film portrays the general public’s reaction to the mandate. Resistance is scattered and ineffective. No one seems to be radically against it. Most treat the annual lifting of the prohibition as a special event to look forward to. There’s even a subtle sense that many people are grateful to be told what to do. There is, for example, a rock star character who is initially set up as the leader of the protest movement yet, when he’s alone with the heroine, he says that the mandate is kind of a good thing because it makes sex special again. “Maybe the fascists were right,” he says.
Ultimately, though Owen and Allie do finally meet-up just before the 12-hour period ends, they decide not to have sex because they don’t want to be pressured into it. That in itself could have been a humorously ironic ending but the film muddles that by having Owen argue that, if they did have sex, then the mandate’s sponsors would “win” so therefore they shouldn’t. The film treats this as a moment of rebelliousness and a moral victory, when it is in reality deeply confused: Exactly how does abstaining from sex prove that the forces that want you to abstain from sex are wrong? This is the intellectual level the films runs at.
In the theater where I saw the film, a large contingent of women audibly groaned with irritation when they realized the characters wouldn’t, at long last, actually be doing it. (An epilogue shows the characters having sex the following year.)
One Night Only reflects our confused times, when thanks to the Internet, erotica is more available than ever, yet younger generations are reportedly becoming withdrawn and having less sex. A time when, thanks to social media, everyone feels like they’re being watched and judged at all times. The film posits an alternate reality where choice is taken away and most people are grateful to be relieved of the responsibility. Is it really that different from our own world?
Read more Whatever Happened to the Spare Tire?
READ MORE from Sean Higgins:
Is Donald Trump a Working-Class Hero?
The Sentimental Side of Bad Santa
Teacher of the Year
About the Author
