What’s so funny about a world in which extramarital sex is illegal? This wild-night romcom explores the horny ha-ha’s
One Night Only
Starring Callum Turner & Monica Barbaro
Directed by Will Gluck
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Aug. 7, 2026
A “sex comedy” with some stinging societal undertones, One Night Only is set in a dystopian alternative reality where it’s illegal to have sexual relations outside of marriage. Except for one night only, a 24-hour period set aside each year when hot-to-trot, love-starved singles are free to mingle.
Callum Turner plays Owen, a pizza maker on the prowl when his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) tells him she has other plans—with another guy—for the evening. Ouch! Monica Barbaro is Allie, a commercial jingle singer hoping to hit a high note or two with a sexy hookup.
Owen and Allie don’t know each other, but we watch them meet, intersect throughout the night and eventually…well, you’ll have to see the movie to find out. In between, you’ll see a slew of familiar faces in comedic cameos and supporting roles, including Molly Ringwald, Levar Burton, Bobby Canivale, Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, indie singer King Princess, SNL’s Pete Davidson and Ben Marshall, and Este Haim of the musical sister trio Haim (who also composed the film’s soundtrack).
But Turner (who starred in last year’s afterlife comedy Eternity with Elisabeth Olsen and Miles Teller) and Barbaro (so impressive as Joan Baez alongside Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown) are the real workhorses here. We’re along for the ride as their characters run a gauntlet of wild-night situations, in a hospital emergency room, a police station, a recording studio, a crashed party and up, down and all across the teeming streets of New York City.
I particularly enjoyed how a jingle Allie records—for a product to combat plaque psoriasis—becomes a much bigger recurring punchline. And how the subject of a book she remembers from her childhood, about the little red lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge, sets the stage, literally, for the movie’s finale.
Director Will Gluck knows how to put a uniquely funny spin on movie romcoms, as he did with Easy A and Anyone But You. Here he relishes the clever details of a “world” in which unmarried sex is taboo, and people are branded with wrist biosensors to monitor their bed behavior. As you might expect, the “chastity mandate” is hugely unpopular; we see graffiti expressing the wide malcontent, and infographics showing “acceptable” and “unacceptable” displays of affection.
When the sun goes down and the “one night” begins, there’s a mad rush on condoms (surge-priced, of course), and costumed vendors dressed as oversized tubes of KY Jelly hawk their lubricant to sidewalk passersby.
It’s like a merry mashup of George Orwell, The Handmaid’s Tale and When Harry Met Sally, with more sex jokes—a lot more. But it’s also a movie with a lot more than sex on its mind. There’s a gravity to all the sexy light-heartedness, a somber sense that its reality—of government intrusion into who we can love, and when—isn’t so far-fetched. Like when we see a newscaster reporting on the “purity” of America. And it’s not just a throwaway line when characters talk about the “crazy time” they’re living in, on the “most unromantic night of the year.” Or a policewoman (Michelle Hurd, from TV’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) is chided for “being on the wrong side of history” when she talks about a repeat offender arrested multiple times for his extramarital crimes of passion.
It’s never raunchy, but always zingy, a movie about surging hormones allowed out of the box for a nocturnal buffet of sensual splurging. But there’s a sweetness too, a sense that sex is but one part of a healthy romantic relationship.
“Maybe we shouldn’t overthink this,” Owen says at one point. Indeed. One Night Only is a zippy, zany satire of a world gone crazy, in more ways than one—a world that looks, and feels, very familiar. And very funny, at least until you start thinking about how close to reality it might really be.
—Neil Pond