One Night Only

Having been a script on Hollywood’s Black List, a list of unproduced but highly esteemed spec scripts floating around the industry, One Night Only is one of the few to have actually found its way to production. Written by Travis Braun and directed by Will Gluck, it is set in a not-too-distant future where conservatives in power have implemented a mandate that only allows non-married people to engage in sex once a year. How do they regulate this, you might ask. By installing color-coded images on everyone’s wrists, indicating whether one is married or single. On the one-night-only event, the color of those unmarried changes and they are allowed to engage and indulge.

And do they indulge. The city is utterly overrun by the zealous excitement to copulate. While the majority of people plunge into the almost Dionysian ritual of heated excess, two people exercise self-restraint and attempt to find not just a sex partner but someone with whom they connect and see a potential long-term prospect. Enter Allie (Monica Barbero), a frustrated singer eeking out a living doing cheesy commercial jingles (primarily for psoriasis). She meets up with a friend who isn’t burdened by the goal of seeking meaning; while fantasizing about a man she has met, Allie sets her sights on the Great Unknown: someone out there who, hopefully, she’ll meet before the time is up.

Pizza-maker Owen (Callum Turner), of course a sexy and charismatic down-to-earth worker, is already hooked up, living with a girlfriend (Maya Hawk) who regretfully informs him that she has decided to step out of their comfort zone and sleep with a new man while remaining in a sexless relationship with Owen. She urges him to also step out and explore, find someone new. We know where this is going.

What proceeds is a somewhat clever, and even sweet, examination of monogamy and marriage versus singledom and casual sex. Not a moral judgment, but a comedic look at the hijinks and horrors of searching for the one while the easy way out and immediate gratification are, for an extremely limited time in a fascist future, within easy reach. Do you give in to temptation and instant pleasure, or do you risk long-term delay for the potential of connection?

The script takes its time with the misadventures of the two protagonists who are looking everywhere but at who is right in front of them as they cross paths again and again in their thwarted quests for the right hookup. Barbero and Turner are endearing and plucky, if sometimes in cliched and overwritten ways; the film’s self-consciousness sometimes eclipses the natural comedy but quickly makes up for it with the combination of the script’s pacing and the actors’ presence.

One Night Only is a fun night at the movies, with even a nice *gasp* moral to the tale at the end, a refreshing change in a media landscape that seems to sell sex and superficiality over substance. But it isn’t heavy-handed or evangelical about it; the film nicely reaches this conclusion without losing its comedic backbone.