Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro are heading into a New York City romance with a rule book nobody can quite explain. Their new film, One Night Only, follows two single people who have one 12-hour window each year, from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., when premarital sex is legal.
Will Gluck, who directs the upcoming romantic comedy, said nobody in the film’s world remembers why the law exists. The point, he said, is simply that the exception is there for one night a year, and that is enough to set the story in motion. One Night Only is due in theaters on Aug. 7.
The setup leaves Barbaro’s Allie and Turner’s Owen stranded in the middle of a night they both hate. Gluck said Owen’s ex-fiancée and Allie’s best friend both choose to spend the night with someone else, leaving the pair as “two lost souls by themselves in New York City, having no tether and no friends, because they've basically [been] ghosted.” Turner said the universe keeps shoving them back together over and over on one crazy night, calling it “almost a cosmic joke” that the night they dislike is the night that brings them together.
Gluck has framed the film less as a provocation than as a chase. He said it is “less about the act of having sex and more about the pursuit of it,” and compared the setup to The Purge only to reject the comparison’s more extreme expectations, saying viewers should not expect orgies or nudity everywhere. That distinction matters because the movie is trying to sell a high-concept romantic comedy, not a shock picture.
The timing also lands in a movie market that still has room for a good rom-com, even if the genre no longer carries the cultural weight it once did. Barbaro said audiences are willing to go to theaters for romantic comedies when the films are really good, and added that Gluck has a special ability to make one sing in the theater space. The question for One Night Only is whether that chemistry, and the odd one-night premise around it, is enough to pull audiences back in when it opens this summer.
Gluck knows the lane. He previously directed Easy A, Friends With Benefits and Anyone But You, and he is once again betting that sharp timing and star pairing can do the heavy lifting. If One Night Only works, it will not be because of the law in its plot. It will be because the law forces Allie and Owen into the kind of romantic collision Gluck is best known for staging, with no escape hatch until morning.
