The bars are flooded with single people dressed in their sexiest getups and looking vaguely uncomfortable. Each of them is smiling a little too wide, trying a little too hard: They want to leave with one of these strangers, stat. Pair off too fast, and they might get stuck with someone insufferable; wait too long, and they might ride the subway home alone at 3 a.m., trying not to stare at the happy couples sloppy-French-kissing.
Quick: Is this the plot of One Night Only, or is this a random Friday night in a major city?
The new film by Will Gluck, who also directed such rom-com smashes as Easy A and Anyone but You, follows a decidedly bonkers premise: The U.S. government has outlawed premarital sex. It uses biosurveillance to enforce the ban, tracking people’s dopamine, serotonin, and testosterone levels and alerting law enforcement when two singles show hormone spikes at the same time. The only exception is during one 12-hour window every year: a night when unmarried horndogs run wild, dry humping in the streets like 17-year-olds. Owen (played by Callum Turner) thinks he’ll spend the evening with his girlfriend—until she announces that she wants to embrace her one chance to “explore,” meaning sleep with someone else. (He then decides to do some exploring of his own.) Allie (Monica Barbaro) begrudgingly goes out with her friend to find a partner for the night—until that friend immediately splits with a guy she just met, leaving Allie alone in a sea of deeply off-putting suitors.
One Night Only is obviously not a work of realism, even when you ignore the questionable science. For one thing, if strangers in bars talked to one another this much, America might not be in a romance slump. The vibes in this fictional Manhattan are exuberantly randy—unlike in the world we actually occupy, where Gluck reportedly had to cut nudity out of the film because test audiences reacted so negatively to it. When people can have sex only one night a year, the film implies, they lust hard. (“Maybe the fascists were right about this one,” a peripheral character offers.)
But One Night Only does capture something true about the anxieties and pressures of modern singlehood. The prospects can seem both abundant and astoundingly unappealing. Not trying feels like missing an opportunity, but trying might be worse; Allie wants a real connection but doesn’t assume it will be easy to find. And she’s skeptical that a fling could be all that fun if it’s with a person she’s not excited about. The situation isn’t fair: Although their married friends get to have sex whenever they please, Allie and Owen have to go through enough trials and humiliations to fill a 102-minute run time. This is, unfortunately, a completely realistic inequity. Researchers have found that single people who say they’re sexually satisfied tend to report greater well-being. But only about 15 to 30 percent of singles are sexually active at all: no ban needed to keep the partnerless masses celibate.
The movie is suffused with a sense of loneliness: Allie and Owen always seem to be walking solo down the street or making their way through crowds who don’t register their existence. But they’re not isolated just because they’re looking for companionship. The sense of alienation is also from a society designed by and for couples. In the real United States, single people tend to pay much more for essentials such as rent and groceries. They miss out on tax breaks, health-care benefits, and a bevy of other perks afforded to married couples. Meanwhile, they feel pressured to shell out on dating-app subscriptions, events, and fancy dinners if they ever want to stop paying the “singles tax.”
The movie’s alternate U.S. isn’t so different, in this way: Again and again, the characters are confronted with attempts to either penalize or cash in on their singlehood. A price-gouging store owner sells her last remaining condom for $200. Dating-app scammers lure vulnerable marks. K-Y salespeople push free samples on the street. Ads across the city target singles (“You’ve been training for this one night,” Equinox taunts; “Get lingual for the one night,” Duolingo urges). You get the sense that Allie and Owen are in a rat race: scurrying around and trying to find their piece of cheese but trapped in a maze by authorities who inhibit and exploit them.
So it’s singles against the world—and also against one another. The people Allie and Owen come across seem to be either lecherously sizing them up or treating them poorly (or some combination of the two). The protagonists themselves have an adversarial relationship: a rom-com trope, but in this case, it is explained only by the fact that Owen throws up near Allie’s shoes when they first meet. (And who would mind so much, really, if Callum Turner vomited in their proximity? Especially on a night like this?) The two proceed to deceive each other, insult each other’s appearances, and abandon each other in precarious situations. There’s no solidarity. No one in this movie even seems particularly nice.
In the end, One Night Only doesn’t have much to say about a fascistic government’s overreach or the pleasures and disappointments of casual sex. It’s more of an abstract portrait—an evocation of how singlehood can feel. The screenwriter Travis Braun has said as much. “I set out to write a movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “about the circus that is modern dating.” A circus is exactly what he depicts: a chaotic, ridiculous affair, full of amusing characters performing and vying for attention, never quite masking an unmistakable whiff of sadness.
[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]
If the movie is more goofy than profound, that may be the point. In Braun’s script, the merciless obstacle course of singlehood seems just absurd. One Night Only is one of a whole slate of pointedly unsexy sex comedies that have been released in the past few months; The Invite, The Drama, Pillion, and I Want Your Sex are all, in their own ways, send-ups of passion gone awry. They’re hardly the first to juice awkwardness and romantic missteps for laughs. But most of these films never even depict sex; they’re more about the absence of chemistry than the survival of it despite the odds. Perhaps we’ve hit the point when modern romance is so cringe that it’s merely camp.
One Night Only goes one step further, in that it ends up feeling genuinely sex-negative; Gluck and Braun’s empathy for their protagonists is all mixed up with judgment toward their background characters’ formidable libidos. The film has been criticized for being prudish and regressive, and I can’t say I disagree. But maybe it’s just taking the perspective of its viewers—many of whom are skeptical of sex, cynical about courtship, and not in the mood to celebrate free love. The movie presents a dystopia, after all: It’s supposed to feel grim. That might be the most resonant part about it.
The post The Dystopia of Modern Singlehood appeared first on The Atlantic.
