On the surface, One Night Only looks like a regular romantic comedy about two young attractive people (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner) who meet and fall in love over the course of one night.
Plot twist: the latest romcom from writer-director Will Gluck (Easy A, Anyone But You) is so much more. This is, to quote an increasingly popular meme, the movie about "the one night a year single people can legally have sex." What The Purge did for crime, Gluck has done for hooking up.
Whether you've already seen the trailer or you're just learning about this now, you probably have a lot of questions about One Night Only. So did I, even after watching the movie, which threads in the kind of worldbuilding you get from sci-fi — including the fact that it's been three years since "the mandate" went into effect, and how the U.S. government implanted endorphin-tracking sensors into everyone's wrists to enforce the new law. (That's right, this is also a cyberpunk movie.)
Luckily, I had a chance to interview Gluck. So I jumped at the opportunity and showed up with a list of very specific questions such as:
- How did this become a law in the first place?
- Did the Supreme Court try to intervene?
- What about international tourists who visit America?
Gluck didn't exactly love my line of questioning at first.
"There's a lot of things in the movie that we kind of explained as much as we want to explain," he said early on in our 15-minute conversation. "All the questions you're asking, I want people to ask them to each other in the theater."
At one point, he even started quizzing me on the names of the main characters to test whether I'd even watched his movie. But eventually, Gluck came around and we had a fun conversation. (He even messaged me on Instagram a few days later to say how much he enjoyed the interview, which was nice because until then, I couldn't tell if he loved it or hated it.)
Here’s what I learned.
1 How did the sex ban go into effect?
To Gluck's credit, this is answered in the film during a conversation between Molly Ringwald, who plays Callum Turner's mom, and her boyfriend, played by Levar Burton. So maybe that wasn't the best place to start.
"There is that scene where Burton says it was a bill that was passed by Congress," Gluck said. "That is in the movie!"
2 When the sex-ban bill was voted on by Congress, was it a close vote?
"I think it was extremely close," Gluck said. "I think it was about 50.01 to 49.9."
3 Did the Supreme Court try to intervene?
"Well, clearly they have not, because it was just passed," Gluck said. "The Supreme Court very rarely gets involved in legislation. There used to be three branches of government in the United States, until your president came around. But there's three branches of government. So it's hard for them to overturn legislation, but possible. But I think they're gonna have to wait till the politics shifts."
4 Will it swing back eventually?
"Gee, I hope so."
5 Wouldn't people just get married all the time to have sex?
One Night Only quickly establishes that sex is still allowed (and encouraged) for married people, and has unsurprisingly become more popular as a result. So are Americans just having weddings left and right? Gluck says the answer is yes, but there's also a catch.
"Well there's signage if you see it again — which I'm sure you'll be running out to see it again — that there's a rule about marriage," Gluck said. "You have to stay married for one year and one day before you can get divorced. Because if not, people would just go get married, get divorced, get married, get divorced, right? But to answer your question, I bet you the standards are lower, especially when you're younger."
He continued: "There's also signage in the movie of airlines advertising: Fly to Cuba where it's always legal! Fly to France where it's always legal. Fly to Amsterdam where damn it's legal. So you can leave the country.
6 What if you're a tourist who's visiting America?
"Just like anywhere else when you go to the country, you have to abide by their laws," Gluck said. "So when you go through border security, they give you a biosensor. It takes like six seconds."
That's right, anyone who enters the U.S. has to get a chip implanted into their wrist.
"In fact, there was a little bit that was cut out, interestingly enough. The British woman who Callum Turner gets with, she has a sensor and she talks about where she got it at the airport."
7 What's the punishment for breaking the mandate?
One Night Only never actually explains what happens when you break the sex ban, but Gluck offered an answer.
"My guess is, if you do it many times, there's probably fines involved, and then if you ultimately continue to do it, there's probably some sort of jail sentence, I guess," he said. "We didn't wanna get that far into it."
8 Are there mass protests against the mandate?
"These are questions that we've all spent a lot of time asking," Gluck said, "and in fact, a lot of stuff I had and I cut out."
While he didn't offer a direct answer, he did introduce an interesting metaphor that helps explain the entire movie.
"I wanted to set up a situation that was three years ago and see how people deal with life now," Gluck said. "My analogy has always been COVID. If you drop in an alien in 2022, there's signs everywhere. Some people don't wanna do this. Some people wanna wear this. Did people fight it? People didn't fight it? In 2022, you don't really know the answer. But people have to move on with their lives, right? Three years earlier some shit did go down, but now it's three years, and humans have to move on with their lives, whether they like it or not."
Gluck also points out that the movie does establish a resistance movement, best encapsulated by an "F the Mandate" protest being held the next night — even if that protest turns out to be more of a controlled opposition.
"My belief? Yes, there's huge rallies all the time against this," he continued, "but on this day, for the people who are not married, they gotta do what they gotta do. And to me, that's about finding love. If there's another movie, you could do this the day it was passed to get into all that stuff."
9 Why aren't condoms free on this night?
A big plotline in One Night Only is about the two main characters struggling to find condoms. Every store they go to is sold out or charging absurdly high prices. But if the government is going to ban single people from having sex for 354 nights per year, shouldn't protection be free on the one other night? According to Gluck, the answer is actually: They do.
"They've all been sold out," he said. "Then they go to urgent care; they're sold out. She had all these condoms, but her roommate took them. He thought he was gonna go back to his apartment, so he had them there."
Again, Gluck drew a parallel between One Night Only and COVID.
"Everyone has masks in 2021," he said, "but every now and then, didn't you find yourself thinking, Shit, where's my mask?"
One Night Only releases in theaters on Aug. 7