“The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion,” wrote George Orwell, envisioning the dystopian kibosh put on human spirit by the jackbooted state in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Little did he realize that his sweeping prescience would extend to the premise of the new rom-com One Night Only, a film that for legal reasons cannot be officially titled Sex Purge, but for reasons of common sense cannot be referred to any other way.
In the not-so-distant future (Buck Mason-brand shirts still have stylish men “in a chokehold,” so we can’t be too far out), to not-so-evident ends, Congress has narrowly passed a bill forbidding any and all forms of carnal activity between unmarried couples. Should you and the hottie at the end of the bar seek solace in one another’s single company, your paired dopamine release will activate the biometric sensor embedded in your wrist, alerting the local authorities of your unsanctioned fornication. In a Manhattan turned The City That Never Sleeps Together, some resist the omnipresent surveillance state encroaching on our very bodies with signs and graffiti, while some are about as fazed by it as any other recent violation of our personal liberties. But on the 7th of August, from 7 PM until 7 AM the following morning, everyone comes together to observe the annual lifting of the ban and find Mr. or Mrs. Right Now.
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Numerous as they are, the questions raised by this film’s explanatory opening minutes are best sorted into two categories. One might get hung up on pure logistics: Does one-way oral sex trip the alarm, so long as the giving party isn’t overly into it? Why are we told that gay people have somehow figured out workarounds to this system? Is this to suggest that in this universe, orgasms don’t release the same neurochemicals when occurring homosexually? Can a couple swap spouses so long as all wrists remain in sufficient proximity? Should the unspoken-for choose to masturbate in front of each other, how many metres of berth must be maintained?
Other queries take a more political slant: Which party engineered this movement? It smacks of obvious conservatism, but this film also arrives at a time of pronounced sex-negativity on the left as well. In either case, does the final act’s affirmation of waiting to consummate a relationship until you’re in capital‑L Love implicitly endorse fascism? Was free love such a perv-asive problem as to require legislative intervention? The misalignment between the imagined atmosphere of wanton, inescapable horniness and our literally denuded moment is curious; to believe in the oppressive ubiquity of sex requires a very particular cultural vantage, like a university student burnt out on their campus’s “hookup culture,” or an app user frustrated that no one’s looking for a relationship, or someone who’s been held captive in a room with the songs of Sabrina Carpenter as their only stimuli.
These things are all worth thinking about, and viewers will find that during the hundred-minute run time, the question marks only multiply. The film has but the most fleeting interest in answering them, instead following two lonelyhearts adrift on Sexpurgisnacht: pizza shop proprietor Owen (Callum Turner), who’s stinging after his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) abruptly informs him that she’s penciled their downstairs neighbor in for her evening’s dance card, and singer Allie (Monica Barbaro), who still remembers last year’s ghosting all too well. Their paths intersect several times, allowing them a few meets-cute before they decide to team up and help find each other a worthy partner for the night.
In essence, this is a New Year’s Eve movie (dear god, can you imagine Garry Marshall’s Sex Purge Night?) about the jaded and jilted bristling at the compulsory coupling on a special occasion. Director Will Gluck, made a box-office force by the hundred-million take for Anyone But You – which likewise scored laughs from the music of aughts-era coffeehouse-adjacent singer-songwriters – prefers screwballish setups in which pretty people with undeniable chemistry flirt by bickering until they admit their feelings. Barbaro and Turner possess estimable charms, the kind of easy affability that wins a guy the hand of Earth’s most desired woman, but their patter lacks the punch that sells their friction. “Your nose is too cute and petite” does not crackling banter make.
The film’s pedestrian rom-com aspirations are of a piece with its methods on the whole: New York is lovingly photographed yet haphazardly mapped; there are a handful of clever jokes, though they’re all incidental, never contained in the leads’ dialogue; the best gag comes at the end, when the film implicitly admits that this whole thing has been shot like a pharmaceutical advertisement. Though the film truly hits its stride once it’s over, and you’re free to pick over this world’s many conundrums of logic and practicality with a lover or group of friends or even, I suspect, the strangers at your cinema.
Seldom does a film offer this much food for thought with no intention of eating any for itself, leaving us to gorge. Sex Purge is, in a final analysis, mostly fine; it also demands fifty sequels.
