Sexual Fascism in One Night Only

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise is a romantic staple of cinema, in which a couple meets and falls in love over the course of one night of long, meandering conversation. Will Gluck’s One Night Only is like if Before Sunrise happened in a fascist hell in which bodily autonomy is non-existent and everyone is just like…okay with that. It’s a deeply weird movie trying very hard to be a cute rom-com, but if your brain engages with the premise for even half a second, it is impossible to ignore the disturbing politics at the heart of the premise.

One Night Only, which is written by Travis Braun, so he bears a lot of the blame, too, is set in an alternate reality where a conservative-coded political party has forced America into a Sex Purge in which people can only have sex during one night a year. This is suggested to be the kind of unpopular “we gamed the system, so our minority party gets to make the rules” policy we do see in real life in America right now, complete with “Repeal” signs and anti-“mandate” graffiti everywhere. And yet…

Everyone just obeys. For all the signals that no one actually likes the Sex Purge, everyone is weirdly cool with it. The Sex Purge comes with a strict “must use condoms” coda, too, so the loss of bodily autonomy is complete. And there is no suggestion of any other forms of birth control existing, so the implication is that condoms are the only legal BC and everyone is just like “f-ck the mandate but also give me the last condom in New York”. Anyway, the story is about Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro), who meet cute at the beginning of the Sex Purge and then keep bumping into each other while trying to f-ck other people.

Obviously, they should be f-cking each other, except in the weird vein of everyone actually going along with the Sex Purge, Owen and Allie are like, “maybe we should wait”. One Night Only tries so hard to be cute and funny, and there are some good jokes, to be fair, but it is so goddamned weird that everyone just goes along with the Sex Purge with nothing more than an eyeroll at the idea of defying it. At least in the actual Purge franchise, people f-cking HATE the Purge, and the entire franchise is about how it is a smokescreen for systemic injustice and abuse, and an allegory for America’s deeply flawed systems of justice and policy.

One Night Only has no such thoughts. It is the movie equivalent of a baby laughing at jangling keys. It walks directly into a fascist nightmare in which there is no bodily autonomy and the most anyone can muster up about it is a vague “yeah, it’s pretty f-cked up, huh”. Although one character actually says, OUT LOUD, “Maybe the fascists were right this once.” Like, WHAT??? To paraphrase Dril, you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”.

At first glance, One Night Only just seems like a silly, high-concept rom-com. But the more you sit with the reality of the Sex Purge, the more troubling it becomes. Allie has a lesbian roommate/friend, Because Rom Com Trope, who is not Sex Purging because the queer community has been operating around strict hetero morality since the dawn of time, so the Sex Purge is nothing special to her. But also, it begs the question, if the straights in this world are on such a tight moral leash, what IS happening to the queer community? Probably nothing good, right?  

The fascism is definitely the worst thing about One Night Only, but the second worst thing is that there IS a cute “one crazy night” rom-com buried in here. Turner and Barbaro have pleasantly fizzy chemistry—suitable for a rom-com about NOT having sex, their chemistry does not extend to believable levels of horniness for pent-up people looking to get laid—and there is no real reason that this movie could not have been set on like, New Year’s Eve, and they keep running into each other amidst the party chaos. Or make a Cloverfield version in which two people fall in love during a monster attack.

Anything except the insane Sex Purge, rife with fascism. And it does feel like the filmmakers knew how close they were toeing the line, the film tries really hard to play the Sex Purge for laughs, but there is no disguising it, in the end. These people are actually branded like cattle, tracked like Amazon packages, and physically prevented from having sex by cops. There is no amount of romantic chicanery that makes that remotely okay. There is no amount of cutesy bickering that makes up for “we can only screw if our dog tags say it’s okay, otherwise the cops can take us away and that is just our lives now, oh well!”.

You know what lives in the underbelly of One Night Only? The Sex Purge was probably meant to force women into having more babies. That’s the reality here. People who “can’t handle” forced chastity rush into marriage, but remember, condoms are the only BC. Which means there must be a LOT more babies in the world. There is just no escaping the ugliness of this premise, no matter how hard you try. Monica Barbaro cannot smile winsomely enough to gloss over the loss of autonomy her character experiences. Callum Turner isn’t hunky enough to make you forget this is happening in a fascist state. One Night Only isn’t a rom-com, it’s a horror movie.

One Night Only is now playing exclusively in theaters.