One Night Only’s Preposterous Premise Gives Way to a Delightful Romantic Comedy

As you can imagine, this specified “one night” would be especially mad in a city like New York, where people are often a little nuts to begin with, and that’s where One Night Only takes place. Owen (Callum Turner, rendering a reasonably believable American accent) runs a pizza joint, and he’s getting ready to close up shop as this special 12-hour night is set to begin. He’s not married, but he does have a girlfriend (played by Maya Hawke), who informs him, when they meet up for their date, that she wants to use this one free night of premarital sex to sleep with someone else. Owen is crestfallen. But he also figures he may as well try his own luck. That’s how he runs into Allie (Monica Barbaro), also on her own. She’s had a tough workday—she’s a singer, and she’s been toiling in the studio, recording a schmaltzy jingle for a psoriasis commercial—and her evening plans have fallen through: the pal she was set to go out with, Jacinta (King Princess), found herself a literal prince in the early hours of the evening and has taken off. Allie’s roommate (Quintessa Swindell), who happens to be gay and has no interest in these one-night-only shenanigans (“We’ve been dancing around your laws since before the Bible,” they explain, suggesting that the city’s gay population has pretty much ignored the premarital-sex ban altogether), urges her to make the most of the evening, kitting her out in a fetching, if minuscule, green sequined dress left behind by an ex-girlfriend. In this splendid and very hot outfit, completed with spindly heeled sandals, Allie reluctantly toddles off into the night to join her glimmering, mini-skirted sisters. On this night, New York has become a city of stems.