Sex Purge Comedy One Night Only is Great at Foreplay, Not so Good at Climaxing
Leave it to the studio that made The Purge series to allow director Will Gluck (Easy A, Anyone But You) and writer Travis Braun to craft a romantic comedy about the rise of a fascist political regime in the United States that bans all forms of sexual intercourse outside of wedlock every day of the year save one. But that’s exactly the central conceit driving One Night Only. It’s a New York City romp about two strangers, Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner), who keep running into one another throughout a 12-hour period where all they want to do is get laid.
The opening third overflows in not-so-subtle jabs at religious extremism, conservative hypocrisy, and American society’s idiotic ability to vote against its own self-interest time and time again. It’s rare to see such brazen, in-your-face political commentary in an otherwise rudimentary, R-rated major Hollywood sex comedy. But Gluck and Braun seem excited to insert it into their story whenever they can. Better, the studio, Universal Pictures, seems content to let them do it.
How successful they are in their pursuit of this type of social observation is worthy of broader debate. Personally, I think Gluck and company talk a solid game for roughly 30, maybe 40 minutes, and then proceed to play ear service to the whole concept of religious conservatism taking control of the federal government Handmaid’s Tale-style from that point forward. Instead, they keep their focus squarely on Allie and Owen desperately trying to have sex, their growing frustration over continually failing to do so only increasing their deeper emotional attraction to one another.
On the plus side, the main throughline chronicling Allie and Owen’s interactions over this 12-hour period of consensual sex being legal is awfully enjoyable. Barbaro and Turner have terrific chemistry, and their characters are far more interesting than it looked like early on they were going to be. Allie is a professional singer who specializes in commercial jingles (her latest a cleverly terrible riff on Sara Bareilles’s “Brave” for a pharmaceutical company). Owen is the gregarious owner of a popular pizzeria who gets blindsided when his longtime girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in an amusing cameo) states she thinks they should use the annual holiday to play the field.
While neither character is all that unique as far as your typical major studio romcom is concerned, Braun’s script goes out of its way to make them believable and ground each individual in tactile everyday reality. While the world they inhabit is glossy in a celluloid fantasy way, Allie and Owen still exist as two amiable normies one wouldn’t be at all surprised to bump into at a local coffee shop or happily chat with as they’re out walking a dog. It’s nice to have moderately normal people inhabiting a story like this one. This makes it a lot easier to relate to — and accept — much of the absurd stuff that happens to both of them seemingly every other minute or two.
Pity, then, that Gluck isn’t entirely successful in keeping things interesting start to finish. The first half works decidedly better than the second. The cultural observations are more astute. The world dynamics are intriguing. The initial setup of having two people basically going through an After Hours meets Into the Night scenario, only with a lot of heavy petting happening all around (but not to) them, is ridiculous fun. I enjoyed all of that quite a bit.
At a certain point, though, it’s as if Gluck gets scared by the risqué setting and substantially dials things back. Events, even as they accelerate towards a forgone — please excuse the pun — climax, become increasingly chaste. It’s almost as if the film shifts gears and starts accepting the puritanical idea of premarital sex as being legal only one day of the year as appropriate. While I know that’s not the case or the intent, the sensation does unintentionally linger, and this blunts the otherwise strong connection between Allie and Owen that develops over the course of their bizarre, surreal night of carnal craving.
Be this as it may, I did still have a good time. I loved how progressive the depictions of romantic and sexual lust and longing were (the core romance may be heterosexual, but that doesn’t stop Gluck from filling the screening with as many jubilant images of LGBTQ+ canoodling as he can get away with), and it’s been a while since any motion picture had me laughing as suddenly and as unexpectedly as this one does. Additionally, Barbaro is outstanding, giving a bold, bright, three-dimensional performance of physical and verbal dexterity that’s sublime. The talented actor confirms her A Complete Unknown Academy Award nomination was hardly a fluke.
Could One Night Only be better? Absolutely. The goofily dexterous foreplay is certainly better than the subsequent amorous payoff. Still, and this is in large part thanks entirely to Barbaro’s mesmeric talents, in classic New York romcom fashion I’m tempted to state I’d like to have more of what Allie is having, and I don’t have to fake any bedroom theatrics before casually eating a deli sandwich to say it.
– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
