One Night Only (2026)

Black listless

It’s stupid. The premise is so bad. You hear it, and you say “that doesn’t sound like a movie rated anything other than NC-17,” and then you learn that it’s a soft R, more for F-bombs than flesh, and you second-guess yourself. You wonder for half a second if maybe this could be some nifty contraption of screenwriting: a fable set inside a dark reality, its themes of repression and deteriorating sexual politics supertext rather than subtext. And then you think about it for a half second more, and you circle back to the obvious truth: It’s stupid.

I’ve been working a new movie adjective into my lexicon: “Black Listy,” named after the famed Black List, which tracks buzzy, unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood executives’ desks. The phrase is not a compliment, although it is not strictly negative. It describes a story built on a provocative high-concept logline, the kind that sounds more like a creative writing exercise than an actual movie. Done right, a Black Listy movie is a real hooky good time: The Menu, a 2019 Black List alum, was satire so broad it would have faceplanted without a sense of fun, and it had fun to spare. Done wrong, you get a gimmicky concept with no real storytelling scaffolding. One Night Only is about as Black Listy as it gets, and not the good kind. Fittingly, Travis Braun’s script didn’t just land on the Black List; it topped the 2024 edition, a year after his horror script Bad Boy did the same.

I’ve been dodging saying what the concept is, so here goes: The Purge, but sex. People are only legally permitted to have premarital sex on one night per year. The mind immediately boggles at worldbuilding questions: How is this tracked? (You get embedded with a sensor, or something.) What acts constitute sex? (The devices seem to track arousal, so maybe all acts? Maybe even watching a particularly steamy R-rated movie?) Are extramarital affairs policed? (Not addressed.) Masturbation policies? (No idea.) It’s a premise that frustrates: It raises questions the movie isn’t equipped to answer, assuming we’ll accept some brushing off of details. I had a similar gripe with last year’s Eternity, another Black Listy romance, whose afterlife I described as “a half-baked pile of rules that appear when the plot needs them.”

The law, known as the Mandate, allows 12 hours of legal fooling around, and New York treats the occasion like a horny holiday, brands cashing in and all. Owen (Callum Turner), a pizzeria owner, has the night planned with his longtime girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), until she ditches him for someone else. Across town, Allie (Monica Barbaro), a commercial jingle singer with stage fright (the kind of profession that exists only in movies), is sick of getting ghosted after the annual free-for-all and wants someone who’ll stick around until morning. They meet, they click, and then a string of mishaps keeps bouncing them in and out of each other’s orbit all night.

If a movie is going to build itself on a hook this wild, I’d at least want it to take a swing. Get goofy with it. One Night Only doesn’t. It is content just to be a down-the-middle romantic comedy that uses its scenario no differently than a hundred other stock setups. You could make almost this exact movie, with only minor rewrites, about two people lonely on Valentine’s Day or two bickering singles faking a romance at a destination wedding. The latter, in fact, is what Will Gluck most recently made before this, the surprise 2023 hit Anyone But You starring ascendant Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Curiously, Braun has said that film’s success, proof that R-rated romcoms could still work in theaters, is part of why he wrote this script in the first place. (Gluck sneaks in both of them, too: Sweeney turns up on Owen’s dating app, and Powell, seen only in a phone photo, is the hunky neighbor Malika ditches him for. It’s as if he wants to remind you which movie you’d rather be watching.)

For a film about a world where everyone is desperate to hook up ASAP before the clock runs out, One Night Only is weirdly sex-averse. Compared to Anyone But You, which was popping with steam and sexual tension even if its execution was phoned in, this one is scripted like a PG-13 movie about 90% of the time, and a mediocre PG-13 romcom at that. My biggest writing gripe is when Gluck shows the characters finally hooking up, then cut saway to reveal it was only a fantasy. It gives us a meaningless catharsis, the payoff of seeing the characters connect, yanked away the moment it arrives.

The first act makes a couple of satirical jabs at the zealots and hypocrites who’d dream up a law like this, and yet the ending lands on a very ambivalent note about sex, as if the movie doesn’t have any strong opinions one way or the other about the topic it’s built around. It doesn’t help that Gluck, who rewrote Braun’s script himself, has said he cut “so much nudity” after test audiences squirmed, citing Gen Z’s (and, he argues, everyone’s) diminishing appetite for sex on screen. This from the director of Friends With Benefits, exactly the kind of frank, R-rated studio romcom the world needs more of. Okay, but why make this specific movie, Mr. Gluck?

A couple of smaller complaints, since I’m already venting. Visually, the film is deeply generic, with the frictionless sheen of a pharmaceutical ad, which at least suits Allie’s day job singing pop hits rewritten as drug jingles (the thread about which is the movie’s sharpest satire, honestly). Less fitting is the product placement — Dunkin’, Durex, and Equinox all cash in on the big night — so relentless that it’s hard to tell where the satire of advertising ends and the advertising itself begins. (Gluck swears none of it was paid. He says he had to beg brands to let the movie twist their products into “one night” jokes, which means the brands got to approve the jokes made at their expense. Satire with a permission slip; hooray.)

I’d actually be pretty open to the film if not for the astringent mismatch between its premise, which begs for something daring, and its tone, which is not daring in the slightest. That stings, because on paper this is my kind of movie. One of my sterling rules of filmmaking is the Superbad axiom that a silly sex comedy with a warm relationship at its core, set over one crazy night, is a tough formula to screw up. One Night Only, which has its leads fighting over the last condom in town (a scene less funny than it sounds), gets most of those ingredient right, he just has the wrong recipe. Gluck is one of the industry leaders at this kind of easygoing, cast-focused, not-quite-a-throwback romcoms: Barbaro and Turner have decent chemistry, the story moves at a steady clip (even if the night’s near-misses get repetitive), and you’re really pulling for the pair by the end. Usually, that’s enough to win me over. Not this time; the whole thing just feels off.

As with any romcom, most of what works here comes from the cast. Barbaro is the best in show, and this is a role designed to make her a bona fide movie star, but it won’t. She projects a complex and lovable human (and, I confess, she’s major crush material here). In A Complete Unknown, Oscar nomination notwithstanding, she seemed a little baffled by Joan Baez; here she’s wonderfully at ease, and she gets to show off her singing once more. Turner’s deal, here as in Eternity, is that he’s tall, handsome, and likable, which is not nothing. Together, they click more as comic partners than as lovers, which, given how little lovemaking is actually on the table, may have been the plan. Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton, as Owen’s mom and her partner, get a few amusing moments but barely enough screen time to matter.

Barbaro deserves a better showcase, and so does the romcom, a genre that can’t afford to squander its rare trips to the multiplex on a failed gamble this hollow. Anyone But You proved romcoms could still work in theaters; One Night Only, which opened to a scant $5.5 million domestically, is an underwhelming counterpoint. It dangles a provocative world it won’t explain, then refuses actually provoke once we’re inside it. I gave the premise its half second. Then I gave it 102 minutes. It’s stupid.

Is It Good?

Not Very Good (3/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.