One Night Only (2026)
Directed by Will Gluck
Two love-starved strangers crash into each other on the one night of the year when single people are allowed to have sex.
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29 films that influenced One Night Only
What critics say influenced One Night Only
The result resembles The Purge by way of Before Sunrise, with just enough satirical bite to sharpen the comedy without overwhelming the romance.
So, One Night Only is both a boy-meets-girl romantic comedy and a dystopian movie, as if Anyone But You was set in the world of The Purge.
Think The Purge, but sex instead of murder.
Essentially, this is The Purge, but for sex, so don’t think too much about it.
Think of “One Night Only” as “The Purge” with hormones instead of homicides.
One Night Only has a premise quite similar to The Purge. Premarital sex is banned in the country, but people are allowed to break the ban for just 12 hours once a year.
He keeps the pace flowing as he emulates AFTER HOURS (boy, that movie is so influential)…
Equal parts aw-shucks, sincerity and swagger, Turner clicks with Barbaro as their “After Hours”-style adventures (without the edge of the Martin Scorsese NYC classic) keep them in one another’s orbit.
…this film from rom-com guru Will Gluck (Anyone But You, Easy A, Friends With Benefits) has created something more akin to After Hours, which similarly was a series of mishaps during one long night in NYC. Not nearly as dark as that Scorsese gem, One Night Only, despite its unique premise, follows the template of the romantic comedy genre in predictable fashion.
At times, it almost feels like a romcom version of After Hours (1985), with one chaotic circumstance leading to another.
The problem with One Night Only’s gonzo premise is that screenwriter Travis Braun has essentially created a version of the United States that has a lot more in common with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale than a rom com should.
On paper, it’s the set-up for a grim Handmaid’s Tale–adjacent horror of a totalitarian state insisting extreme control over the body…
…a repressive, "Handmaid's Tale" lite version of Congress…
The Purge meets Before Sunrise.
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It is like the second coming of a Seventies sitcom like “Three’s Company.”
Curiously, Gluck makes this rom-com feel like an action movie with a frenetic ticking-clock plot where the characters run around to race against time, à la Run Lola Run, Speed, Midnight Run, etc.
What made When Harry Met Sally… work, and such a classic in the genre, is how a key selling point of the whole movie was that Harry and Sally were never motivated by possibly sleeping with one another.
Curiously, Gluck makes this rom-com feel like an action movie with a frenetic ticking-clock plot where the characters run around to race against time, à la Run Lola Run, Speed, Midnight Run, etc.
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Curiously, Gluck makes this rom-com feel like an action movie with a frenetic ticking-clock plot where the characters run around to race against time, à la Run Lola Run, Speed, Midnight Run, etc.
…if this were just a laugh-out-loud raunchy comedy, à la The Hangover or Superbad, you would appreciate it for making a comedy that dissects what it means to be single in this day and age…