You can imagine the pitch meeting. “How about The Purge – but with sex instead of violence?” This is, in essence, the premise of One Night Only, billed as a new “romcom” – though the “com” element is sorely lacking – starring Dua Lipa’s missus, Callum Turner.
In this alternative (future?) version of the United States, premarital sex has been outlawed. Everyone has a chip inserted into their arm – with the spurious tech explained to the audience via various clunky bits of exposition – which can sense when two people close to each other are getting, ahem, excited. To ensure compliance, singles are given one night a year when the mandate is lifted and they can legally shag whoever they like for 12 hours. There’ll be no bastard babies born here, however: sex is only legal with a condom, birthrate decline be damned.
Though the concept might have packed a punch in an initial meeting full of unimaginative suits, it is very, very hard to see how this bizarre movie made it through the many painstaking and costly stages it takes for something to go from tentatively greenlit to feature film complete with cinematic release. It’s even harder to see how Turner, a frontrunner to play the next Bond, was convinced to star in it.
Aside from the more obvious plot holes, mediocre script and absence of any real chemistry between Owen (Turner) and fellow romantic lead Allie (Monica Barbaro), what makes the film feel so tonally strange and out-of-step is that it has been produced at this particular point in US history.
It’s no coincidence that Margaret Atwood’s seminal 1985 book, The Handmaid’s Tale, found a whole new audience in recent years, when it was adapted into an Emmy award-winning show spanning six seasons: right-wing, puritanical values are troublingly on the rise across the Atlantic.
The results of a recent Gallup poll pointed to a real growth in social conservatism in the US, with fewer Americans finding certain behaviours “morally acceptable”. The survey revealed record-low acceptance for birth control (83 per cent), while fewer people agreed with having a baby outside of marriage (down to 58 per cent) or sex between teenagers (down to 35 per cent).
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 proved a huge blow to the pro-choice movement; in the intervening four years, abortion has been made illegal in nearly all circumstances in 13 states and severely restricted in another 12.
If the filmmakers dreamt up their surreal One Night Only set-up as a purely comedic foil, so far-fetched as to be utterly inconceivable, they chose the wrong time to make it.
What’s perhaps most uncomfortable about the whole premise is that it’s never interrogated too closely by the characters themselves. Sure, there’s the occasional bit of “F*** the mandate” graffiti shown here and there; an interview with a middle-aged white male politician about how successful the policy has been in reducing teen pregnancy and STDs is accompanied by some eye-rolling from the leads; allusions to the law being passed by Congress rather than voted on by citizens are fodder for verbal sparring. A brief interaction between Allie and a police officer has the former questioning the wisdom of wasting overstretched resources on arresting people for having consensual sex.
In the world of the film, there’s very little resistance in response to the imposition of a regime that strips people of bodily autonomy
But this smattering of dissent is notably scant and half-hearted; in the world of the film, there’s very little resistance in response to the imposition of a regime that glorifies purity culture, strips people of all bodily autonomy and encourages them into early wedlock. Making widespread acceptance of all this darkly draconian body fascism the backdrop to a central “love story” is a telling choice (as is showing almost no nudity or actual, well, sex, in a film set on the one night of the year that horny singles are allowed to run riot).
The construct might be a faintly ludicrous plot device, but it mirrors some of the current live discourse around sex and relationships far too closely for comfort. At one point, for example, the politician on TV references the fact that the term “incel” has become a badge of honour in the new world order. It’s presented as a flippant, humorous remark – completely at odds with a reality in which incel culture has gone hand-in-hand with a disturbing rise in misogynistic attitudes and toxic masculinity doctrine entering the mainstream.
At the same time, the tradwife movement in the US, popularised by airbrushed social media posts depicting the “idyllic” lives of wives and mothers who have supposedly found happiness and fulfilment by relinquishing all financial independence and autonomy, is pushing marriage as the ultimate goal for young women. This disturbing ideology has seen women arguing not just against feminism, but in favour of rescinding their own right to vote, claiming that democracy should be exclusively a husband’s purview as head of the household.
Yes, One Night Only can easily be written off as a nonsense, ill-thought-out movie whose main legacy could be taking Turner out of the running for serious 007 contention. But pop culture, however fictional, can’t help but reflect a grain of truth about the real-world political landscape we find ourselves in. Lack of good gags notwithstanding, perhaps that’s the real reason this film is far more frightening than funny in 2026.