One Night Only makes fun of purity culture, yet perpetuates it

If I turned my brain off, One Night Only (dir. Will Gluck) would be a funny movie with heart.

Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) meet on the one night a year that unmarried adults can have sex. As expected, everyone eligible goes buck wild to take advantage of those sweet 12 hours when premarital sex is allowed. Hijinks and hilarity ensue, with some genuinely funny moments (one featuring Maroon 5's "Payphone").

But here's the problem: I can't turn my brain off. Rom-com One Night Only comes at a time of increased surveillance and policing of sexual expression on the internet. And in the movie, totalitarianism is played for laughs. 

How the titular One Night Only works

My biggest question after seeing the trailer is: How are they going to pull off, as the internet has taken to calling it, "The Purge for sex"? 

At the start of the movie, we're told through a text overlay that the law (called "the mandate") deeming premarital sex permitted for one night a year went into effect three years prior. Throughout, we learn a few details: It was a law passed by Congress, not voted on by the people. It happened after the Obama administration (revealed after a strained "thanks, Obama" joke), but there's no explicit mention of which president this happened under.

Law enforcement figures out who isn't complying through a biosensor installed on every unmarried adult's wrist; it is red 364 days a year and calls the police if there's a too-high dopamine spike. No word on whether masturbation is also banned, but if your dopamine gets too high during self-loving, god help you, I guess.

During the "one night" (which is really just 12 hours) that premarital sex is legal, the biosensors turn from red to green, and they're not monitored as they usually are. But if you haven't complied throughout the year, you won't have the "privilege" of being able to have sex during the night. 

Condoms are also compulsory, but it's not explained how the police would figure out if you haven't used one. It's rather a plot device to delay Allie and Owen's doomed sexual encounters with other people. 

What about gay sex? That's explained away fairly early on by Allie's lesbian roommate, who is more a brief sidekick than an actual character: Gay people have been skirting around "your laws" since the Bible, she said. Still, there are a few gay couples peppered as extras in some scenes.

The results of the mandate have apparently been fantastic, according to a suit who works for the lab that developed the biosensor. Sex is now saved for the "sanctity of marriage," after all. Since it went into effect, rates of unwanted pregnancies and STDs are down. (You know what else decreases these things? Comprehensive sex education.) Beyond that, it's now a "badge of honor to be an incel." (AHHHHHH.)

See One Night Only for punchlines and background Easter Eggs

For the zany/scary concept, there is something to love about One Night Only. Turner and Barbaro's performances are good, and I'm glad we hear Barbaro's voice following her turn as Joan Baez in 2024's A Complete Unknown. Her character, Allie, sings commercial song parodies for a living. In an early scene, she belts about a plaque psoriasis medication to the tune of Sara Bareilles's "Brave," and those were the first roars of laughter in my screening.

The laughs didn't stop there. Throughout the film, there's humor both crass and wholesome, and the theater crowd seemed to have a great time. (I won't spoil you for how Maroon 5 is involved.) 

Mashable Top Stories

And there's something quaint about the story — not the fact that sex is somehow more "sacred" under this regime, but that Allie and Owen don't exchange numbers or last names, making it genuinely difficult to find each other. (Though, through movie magic, they always do.)

The film also astutely shows how society would mold itself to fit the new status quo should premarital sex be banned. Backgrounds are peppered with ads from Red Bull, Dunkin, and Equinox about "the night." Sellers gouge prices for haircuts and condoms (Durex, always). The Empire State Building is lit up in green.

But One Night Only seems to be doing the same conforming. In a country that repealed Roe v. Wade and instated age-verification laws for First Amendment-protected content — not to mention that the Trump administration is now going after the birth control pill — One Night Only makes light of rising fascism. Like the in-universe Red Bull ad claiming to "give you wiiings" for the night, the movie is winking and nodding at our decreasing rights. 

Don't expect One Night Only to have real cultural commentary

The mandate appears to be a retrograde, puritan idea that Congress voted on — but that doesn't seem to be that much of a problem for the American people. 

There is resistance to it…barely. Protests are regulated to signs calling for "REPEAL" and graffiti declaring, "Fuck the mandate!" An anti-mandate concert is scheduled for the day after "the night," but as it turns out, the musician hosting it is a hypocrite. He secretly likes the mandate and says that maybe the fascists were right about this one(!). 

That musician character is also a bumbling misogynist, and he's certainly not the hero of the story. Maybe One Night Only is a stealth satire about such hypocrisy, or about the boiling frog metaphor, but I'm not convinced. The protagonists also don't seem interested in taking action against the mandate. Throughout the film, they decry casual sex and long for romance. They lament the societal push to sleep with people within these 12 hours; they (especially Allie) want to do it the "right" way, with the "right" person.

And the realities of how cruel such a mandate would be are skirted around or unaddressed entirely. 

Let's be real: If straight premarital sex is banned, gay sex would be, too. SCOTUS deemed state sodomy laws unconstitutional just 23 years ago. But in the movie, gay sex is a brief joke one minute, and several gay couples are shown complying the next.

Another harrowing topic that went unmentioned is sexual violence. Some male characters are misogynistic to Allie, and others give her leering glances. But it's something that I, as a woman, couldn't stop thinking about — whether women would be forced to participate in the night even if they didn't want to.

Pornography is also never mentioned in the film (or, if I missed it, only in passing), but surely it would be banned before straight premarital sex, too. As it is, Project 2025 (the blueprint for President Trump's second term) calls for porn to be banned and the imprisonment of its creators. In the world of One Night Only, that would probably get treated as another gag as opposed to the free speech nightmare that it is. 

On the topic of free speech, which pornography falls into, it's almost unbelievable that any dissent would slide here, even the tepid REPEAL signs. In our actual world, people were arrested over social media posts following Charlie Kirk's assassination. You can't tell me that this regime would be OK with civilians saying "fuck the mandate." No, the population of One Night Only would be neutered, in more ways than one.

The audience is also expected to yuck it up for surveillance. Partway through the movie, an ill-fated love interest of Allie's is arrested because he violated the mandate and wasn't allowed to participate in the night. He tries to escape from the cops, naked, and fails. Then, in a police station, Allie is also scrutinized, and other rebels are shuffled in. Restaurants and shops have signs telling employees to report violations, but other than these instances, the Big Brother-style operation that would need to exist to enforce this law isn't explored. 

I know, I know: It's "just a movie." But movies have the power to reflect our reality and to actually say something about it. Case in point: The real Purge series.

The Purge was a commentary on what privilege can protect you from and the barbarism that seems uniquely American. One Night Only may comment on a uniquely American puritanism — there are brief scenes of foreign news programs discussing the U.S. "celibacy night" — but if anything, the film falls for the same ideas of the mandate. 

When Allie and Owen finally get together in the end, they decide to not spend the last 10 minutes of legal unwedded sex to have any. They decide to wait a whole year until the next one — how beautiful! It's played as a way to once again buck the mandate, even though they…totally comply with it. So what is this movie actually saying?

One Night Only adheres to our rising purity culture; it doesn't defy it. And if it had some real commentary to say, it wouldn't be a rom-com. Like The Purge, it'd be a horror.

If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.