by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $0.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner, Grace Dumdaw, Duncan Jui, Flavor Flav, Molly Ringwald
Intro:
… you shouldn’t pay anything to watch an ad.
There were no ads before this critic’s screening of One Night Only—instead, the session commenced with a film so stuffed with product placements that the movie itself was a one hundred-minute-long commercial, subjecting the audience to the brands of beers, energy drinks, skin care products, rental bikes, apps, clothes, fast food, phones, medicine, condoms, and lubricant.
The premise of the movie is zany and confusing enough to spell out in full: in an alternate version of America today, premarital sex has been banned, with every adult biologically registered for enforcement. While this could easily set up a dystopian nightmare, it’s instead the basis of this madcap rom-com from Will Gluck (director of the very fun Easy A and the very wretched Anyone But You)—because, for a single night of the year, the morality police lay down their arms and let singles fornicate with abandon.
In a New York that is recognisably bustling, unbuttoned, and queer, save for the ubiquitous signs warning people not to have sex, pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner, bulging in a polo) and singer Allie (Monica Barbaro, glittering in sequins) are two of the many singles frantically rushing around the city to find connection, or orgasm, before the sun rises.
Barbaro is an actor of genuine talent, as she demonstrated in A Complete Unknown; Turner knows how to smile. Between the two of them they are able to go through the motions of a rom-com. But even though Gluck clearly has some notion of paying tribute to screwballs and capers, the unfolding coincidences, confusions and slapstick of the night do not come close to the surreal comedy of After Hours, or the romantic subversion of His Girl Friday—instead, viewers are subjected to lame humour and trite conservative morals about relationships, while famous actors regularly have cameos, effectively creating little advertisements for themselves.
Let’s dwell on the conceit, because it’s the only interesting thing about this film. We are told that three years ago the US president was neither Trump nor Biden, but a folksy middle-aged man who has somehow implemented the most severe restrictions in human history. More severe than bans in the surveillance state of China, more enforced than any sexual restrictions of medieval Europe, these laws were apparently promulgated in a federated nation where the party currently in power have proven incapable of passing any major national reforms save for tax cuts.
If we take the film as having anything at all to say—a true act of generosity—then we could see this restriction on bodily autonomy as a loony version of a contemporary America where abortion has been made a crime across vast swaths of the country.
But what this vast network of biological control and regulation of the population also resembles is the fever dreams of the American right during Covid, visions of a population willingly succumbing to biological control at the hands of the state.
Perhaps Will Gluck is craftier than he seems. Perhaps this conceit is calibrated to appeal across every ideological divide, to hit every ‘quadrant’, so that the entire audience can get political vindication and prurient thrills while they’re bombarded with commercial products.
So, One Night Only is rated zero dollars, not because it fails some objective technical criteria—this is a film review, not figure skating—but because you shouldn’t pay anything to watch an ad.
