As if born of a conversation between libidinous boys in the back row of a school bus, “One Night Only” takes the premise of “The Purge” and makes it about sex.
The movie imagines a puritanical dystopia in which premarital encounters are a criminal offense except for an annual 12-hour reprieve. To enforce the prohibition, the government implants everyone with a neurochemical sensor. Should an unmarried person experience particular spikes near someone else, the police are alerted.
Directed by Will Gluck (“Anyone But You,” “Easy A”), evidently our modern bard of bawdy romantic comedy, “One Night Only” opens with a title card describing the status quo. The ban was instituted three years earlier, and “it’s been … a lot,” the text reads. Cue the laughs, although they’re soon swallowed by a pop-heavy soundtrack that, for the movie’s remainder, seems to demand a minimum of three needle drops per act.
Spanning the exemption night, the movie follows Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner), two New York romantics, on their parallel hunts for passion. Allie, an aspiring singer, hopes to use the hours to find her forever mate. Owen, who runs a pizzeria, plans to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke), but instead gets dumped for the hunk downstairs. That leaves our lovelorn pie slinger searching for a temporary palliative while Allie, prone to Prince Charming reveries, chases the real thing.
Despite the evening’s sexual amnesty, the movie is mostly just a tease. The running joke is that, as couples around them go at it, neither of our lovebirds can catch a break, their efforts continually foiled by a spate of blunders and predicaments. Yet the absence of erotic spectacle doesn’t stop the movie from reveling in overtones. Women are assigned plunging necklines and miniskirts, and Turner’s muscled torso is bared more than once. At the pizzeria, he works the dough like an erogenous zone.
If this all sounds implausible, with the movie’s science-fiction conception of the birds, the bees and the biomonitoring, it is. Faced with such folly, people would surely devise ways around the ordinance, namely, by getting married and then divorced in droves.
But “One Night Only” lays no claim to logic. It traffics instead in charisma, and the combined likability of the leads is the putative solution to a premise that’s all flashy surface and no deeper inquiry. With nothing to say about sex or society, the repression plot mostly gets in the way of a movie that would prefer to be a routine romance, complete with a lovers’ rendezvous at a Manhattan landmark at sunrise. It’s too bad for Allie and Owen that the moratorium resumes at 7 a.m., but the courthouse is only a subway ride away.
One Night Only
Rated R for lust let loose. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.