A Surprisingly Subversive Sex Comedy

In his recent memoir, Communion, JD Vance talks about feeling “profoundly sad for today’s kids” navigating the dating scene. “Hookup culture wasn’t good in a lot of ways,” he writes. “It wasn’t exactly a perfect example of Christian sexual ethics. But the mistakes you saw people make were normal mistakes. The kind of things you learned from, talked to your friends about, maybe cried over.” 

The old, familiar nemesis of hookup culture has been replaced by the bleak reality of meat-market dating apps, an endless buffet of online pornography, and algorithmically amplified gender-war content. Vance is not the only conservative who feels a begrudging nostalgia for the errors of yesteryear. If there’s one small consolation, it’s that many agree we’ve hit a cultural dead end; surely something has got to give.

One Night Only, out in theaters nationwide, offers its own wild take on what’s gone wrong. What if, it dares to ask, a world in which there are no rules and restrictions around sex is, in fact, less sexy—not to mention less fulfilling—than a world that treats sex as something powerful, crazy-making, even a little bit dangerous? 

The film is a love letter to New York City; an overt criticism of dating app culture and Big Tech overreach; a gently mocking middle finger to the public health establishment; and either the most red-blooded apologia for purity culture or the most subtly reactionary depiction of hookup culture since HBO’s Girls went off the air. It is, in short, a very First Things sex comedy.

The setup is straightforward enough. Three years prior to the events of the film, Congress passed a “mandate” that makes sex outside of marriage illegal for 364 days of the year. The film takes place entirely on the one Bacchanalian night when the mandate is lifted. 

One Night Only is nowhere close to family-friendly, with plenty of partial or pixelated nudity and raunchy language to spare. But the artificial limit placed around the protagonists’ pursuit of non-marital sex gives their horniness a kind of analog feel—it’s precisely society’s restraints on sex that make the chase that much more thrilling, and more human, than casually swiping right on an app. “I really thought this whole thing was going to ruin sex for me,” says one character, pre-hookup. “[But] it gave it new meaning. Who do you choose to be with for this one night? Choice itself is romantic. Maybe the fascists were right about this one.” 

Mainstream critics haven’t loved the movie, not least because it implicitly dares to side with the vice president and other conservatives who see sex as something deeply meaningful. They also balk at the references to the “fascists” and their “mandate,” clearly meant as a sly wink at another, real-world public health emergency. 

Cutesy corporate ads from Dunkin’ Donuts, Equinox, and Duolingo seem happy to go along with the government’s policy. We get the sense that most people accepted biometric tracking and mandate enforcement without much organized opposition; CDC-produced pictographic warnings and slogans against non-sanctioned sex proliferate throughout the city. The only thing missing is an anti-fornication Dr. Fauci. 

But even as the film pokes fun at the religious right’s imposition of an extremely particular kind of marriage incentive, it betrays real sympathy for the conservative argument that something as powerful as sex needs social norms to give it structure. Our heroine, played by Monica Barbaro, sounds like she’s been reading some conservative critics of contemporary feminism. The chance of having good sex on a one-night stand is something like 2.8 percent, she tells a friend. “Of course I want sex . . . but not sex that just leaves me feeling empty.” 

Her paramour is an amiable pizzeria owner, played by Callum Turner. Their various encounters build toward a late-night pizza, and it’s clear Barbaro’s character is attracted to more than just his wry humor. His expertise and the almost sensual care he brings to his craft are compelling in a way no dating app could capture. It’s the in-person time spent together running around New York that makes them break through to discover a real connection. 

When they get together in the waning moments of the “one night,” they decide they were searching for something more than “casual.” They “can’t let the mandate win” by forcing them into a quick release and risk bringing their arc to a premature conclusion. They’d rather wait a year and get to know each other, without the pressure of needing to decide right then whether to be sexually intimate or not. 

The sexual revolution promised a wide-open landscape of no-strings-attached sex. But the societal impact of depersonalized intimacy and electronic erotica has led more and more women—and no small number of men—to express despair at our brave new romantic landscape. The sexual utopia dreamt of by Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem, to say nothing of the ideal of chastity espoused by Christendom, has been displaced in the new sexual marketplace, where the lowest common denominator is solitary, solipsistic, sexless. 

One Night Only pokes fun at those who were willing to accept restrictions on personal liberty imposed from above and offers a colorfully fantastical vision of aggressively postliberal moralism. When you remove all the barriers that once socially hemmed in young people’s freedom, you also take down the guardrails that guided them to meet, date, and mate. At a time when a growing number of voices—including in Hollywood—are realizing that a society without signposts doesn’t lead to more freedom but to more anxiety and neurosis, One Night Only suggests that voluntary restrictions on our sexual freedoms may end up leading to more happy endings after all.