One Night Only

Reviewed by Fraser · 9 min read · Rated September 2026

Quick bit of background first, because it absolutely shaped how I walked into this one. Will Gluck is the director behind Easy A, that Emma Stone comedy from 2010, and more recently Anyone But You, the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell rom-com that became a surprise box office monster. So the man has form in this genre. The script here comes from Travis Braun, and the premise is, well, a little bit unusual. Premarital sex has been outlawed in the United States, except for one night a year. That’s it. That’s the world. It has that underlying Purge kind of setup, one night where the rules come off, but done as a comedy romance, and honestly it’s nothing like that movie beyond the ticking clock. And leading the whole thing you’ve got Callum Turner, who a lot of you will know from Masters of the Air, opposite Monica Barbaro, who was Phoenix in Top Gun: Maverick and then picked up an Academy Award nomination for playing Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. That’s a seriously interesting pairing for a rom-com, and I didn’t really know what to expect. What I got was a lot funnier and a lot more charming than I was braced for.

One Night, One Very Strange Premise

The movie kicks off with a little bit of text on screen, which I always enjoy, get me up to speed quickly, telling us that three years ago this law came in, and it’s been a lot. We meet Owen, Callum Turner’s character, working at a pizza shop called Claremont’s, surrounded by a whole lot of very, very happy people, and we’re left to join the dots on why they’re all so happy. Owen isn’t married, so this one night a year is all he gets, and he’s off to meet his girlfriend Malika at a restaurant. She’s played by Maya Hawke from Stranger Things, and I have to say it every time I see her: I am still completely shocked at how much she looks like her mum, Uma Thurman. It’s uncanny. On the other side of the city we meet Allie, Monica Barbaro’s character, a singer who pays the bills doing musical adverts, jingles for pharmaceutical products that sound like proper pop songs. Keep that detail in your back pocket, because it becomes one of my favourite things in the whole movie. And then, just as Owen sits down to dinner, Malika drops a bombshell on him: she’s going to sleep with somebody else tonight. The stunned look on his face says everything, and it stings even more once you learn he’d been planning to propose to her.

Now, that soundtrack thing. This took me an embarrassingly long time to pick up on. I kept thinking I was hearing normal songs playing over scenes, except the words were all slightly wrong, and then the penny dropped. The singing adverts Allie makes for work are the actual soundtrack of the movie. Her jingles are scoring her own film. The first one you notice is a very funny song, and I had a proper laugh once I clicked to what they were doing. It’s such a clever little gag, and it keeps paying off the whole way through. It reminded me of the way Easy A wove its running jokes into the fabric of the movie rather than just stopping for them. Gluck loves a bit that keeps rewarding you for paying attention.

The world-building is drip-fed really nicely too. Through a news clip while Allie’s eating alone at a Chinese restaurant, we learn everybody wears a biosensor on their arm that tells the world whether they’re married or single, and when the countdown hits zero it changes colour and the whole city goes absolutely crazy, pouring out into the streets. The company behind it all is called Rexton Labs, and there’s a low hum of controversy running underneath the whole film. Plenty of people in this world don’t agree with the mandate and sound like they want it gone, which gives the comedy a slightly sharper edge than you’d expect. Meanwhile Allie’s flatmate has picked up a prince from Sierra Leone before it’s even seven in the evening, so Allie’s drinking alone, Owen’s eating alone, and the movie starts doing its thing. There’s a montage of Allie walking the streets, then Owen walking the streets, until the two of them literally bump into each other, both staring in opposite directions, straight into one another. They have a bit of a chat, there’s an obvious spark… and then Owen, who has overeaten at a sushi place and had two very strong drinks, throws up right in front of her. And off they go, separate ways. You just know they’re going to stumble across each other again. It’s got a real Serendipity thing going on. If you’ve never seen that John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale movie from the early 2000s, it’s one of the great “the universe keeps them apart” rom-coms, and this film is clearly drinking from the same well.

Two Disaster Runs, One City

From there the movie splits into two parallel disaster runs, and this structure is where it really won me over. Owen tries to be a gentleman when he spots a girl being mugged down the street, only to discover he’s charged into the middle of a movie shoot. Super embarrassing, very funny. He ends up at a bar talking to the bartender, and this is where one of the film’s very, very cool cameos lands. He shows her a photo on his phone of the man Malika is spending the night with, and it’s Glen Powell. The guy from Twisters and the series Chad Powers, popping up as a headshot gag in a nod to Anyone But You. And Sydney Sweeney gets the same treatment later. She flashes past as one of the profiles when Owen is swiping on a dating app, a proper blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Gluck essentially cameo-ing his own previous movie made me smile a lot. Owen actually manages to pick up the bartender, then realises he has no protection, and because this only happens one night a year, every store in the city is completely sold out. Cue a mad dash through New York hunting for condoms. Allie, meanwhile, is working through what’s basically a speed-dating gauntlet at a bar (the magician is very funny) before she picks up a musician, plays piano with him, and comes back to find her bag has been raided. Including, of course, the one thing she needed most tonight. So now the two of them are hunting for exactly the same thing on opposite sides of the same city, and the film does this lovely camera trick where we follow Owen down one road, he crosses the street, and the camera just picks up Allie on the other side and follows her instead. I loved that. It’s the visual language of the movie telling you these two stories are really one story.

They collide again at the back of a store where the last condom in New York is sitting behind glass for $200, cash only, and neither of them has a cent. So they steal it together, flip a coin for it, and watch it roll straight down a drain. Which leads to Owen lowering Allie into a sewer, which is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. Then they’re pulled apart again. She roars off on a motorbike with the musician, who turns out to be too good to be true in a way that involves parole conditions, a gorgeous house he should not be anywhere near, and Allie half naked running around a patio dodging police. Owen fares no better: a one-night dating app match called Sophie ties him to a tree with cable ties, robs him, and leaves him there. So naturally, the two of them reunite at a police station, one giving evidence, one reporting a robbery, trading some huge digs at each other about how the night has treated them. They tag along to a party, he pushes her to sing on stage, and we get this lovely, nervy little performance from Barbaro, complete with the movie’s recurring daydream trick, where her imagination runs ahead of reality. That trick shows up a few times across the film, and each time it lands a bit harder. And through all of this you can see the glances between them stacking up. Barbaro and Turner have proper chemistry, the easy, taking-the-mickey-out-of-each-other kind, and the movie knows its best special effect is just putting the two of them in a room.

The supporting cast around them is stacked with fun choices too. Allie ends up in the orbit of Ezra Stone, a famous singer within the film’s universe played by Charlie Gillespie, and there’s a wonderful beat where she spots a Claremont’s pizza box in his studio bin and you can watch the whole night replay behind her eyes as she taps on the box. Owen, of all places, winds up back at his mum’s house, and his mum is Molly Ringwald, which is such a perfect piece of casting for a romantic comedy. The queen of the genre from the ’80s handing the baton to the next generation. Her partner is played by LeVar Burton, straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the scene Owen walks into over there is… a lot. The whole stretch has a Sliding Doors quality. Two parallel nights, constantly almost intersecting, both of them doing spectacularly badly at the one thing tonight is supposedly for.

Earning the Sweet Ending

The night eventually circles back to Claremont’s pizza shop, and I’ve pulled that scene out as my Frame 70 Moment below, because it stayed with me long after the credits. From there the film races to its finish, and I’ll keep this vague. Owen references Sleepless in Seattle a couple of times through the movie, the meeting at the top of the Empire State Building, and the finale plays with that expectation beautifully. I thought I knew exactly where we were headed, and the movie had one more fake-out in it, landing somewhere far more personal and, honestly, far lovelier. It ties back to a childhood detail of Allie’s that’s been hiding in plain sight, and it ends on a choice between these two characters that I found properly sweet. There’s a final jump forward in time as well, and I’m leaving that entirely for you to discover.

Is it a perfect movie? No. Some of the side quests are clearly there just to keep the two of them apart, and you can feel the screenplay’s hand on the scales once or twice, a couple of contrivances, including one late plot convenience about an address, that you just have to wave through as movie magic. But the hit rate on the comedy is high, the leads are magnetic, and the concept, which could have been sleazy in the wrong hands, is actually one of the sweeter rom-coms I’ve seen in a while. Fair warning: this is very much an adults-only film, absolutely not one for the kids. But as a couples movie for a Friday night, it’s a very, very nice pick. It’s finished its cinema run and it’s not on any streaming services yet, but it is available for digital purchase on the major apps right now.

And look, that’s just how One Night Only landed for me. Entertainment is subjective, and a high-concept premise like this one is going to hit everybody differently. What worked for me might not work for you, and that’s completely okay. But for my money, this is the kind of easy, big-hearted comedy that reminds you why the rom-com refuses to die. If you check it out, come and join the conversation. I’d love to hear where your night with it ended up.