One Night Only review: Sex, Love, and Uncontrollable Purges
Earlier this summer, the Trump administration issued new grant criteria, stating that nonprofits seeking federal funding to help prevent teen pregnancy must counsel adolescents about “family stability” and “marriage prior to childbearing.” It then revoked the grant of an agency called Fact Forward, presumably for the sin of teaching teenagers about proper condom use. So the premise of One Night Only—which takes place in an alternate America where premarital sex has been outlawed, with the exception of a single evening per year—seems less preposterous than it might have a decade ago. The movie is set three years in the future, but it may as well take place in a realm of perpetual Project 2025.
You might perceive this scenario—the U.S. government wielding its power as a surveillance state to curtail the bodily autonomy of its citizens, in part by branding trackers onto people’s wrists—as the backbone of a harrowing piece of dystopian fiction. But Will Gluck, directing from a script by Travis Braun, has no interest in exploring the troubling sociopolitical ramifications of this conceit. Instead, he has molded the idea into a lighter, more frivolous creature (those trackers take the form of colored animal tattoos, how cute!), one whose shape is classically familiar but whose appearance on the big screen is vanishingly rare. He’s made a romantic comedy. Read More
