Who Needs a Good Script When You've Got Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner?

They don’t let a lot of directors put romantic comedies in theaters these days, but they’ll make an exception for Will Gluck, as they probably should. He’s the director behind the 2010s’ best studio romcom (Easy A), the unfairly maligned Annie remake, the underrated Fired Up!, and the highest-grossing romantic comedy since the pandemic, Anyone But You.

Anyone But You was not a good movie, but it did star two fast-rising stars who look good in bathing suits, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney. It succeeded, weirdly, despite their relative lack of chemistry and Sweeney’s mush-mouthed charisma void. People just want to see pretty people make out, fall down, and find themselves in awkward situations.

Gluck’s One Night Only is not a great movie, either, but it has something going for it that Anyone But You did not: Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner. Good god, people, they make for a fetching couple, and there’s enough chemistry between the two to burn a woodstove full of glass logs. It’s rare for a rom-com lead to be as gorgeous as JLo, as knowing as Meg Ryan, and as adorable as Kate Hudson, but Barbaro pulls off the triple threat — she’s the best thing to happen to romcoms since Zooey Deutch. And while it took me a minute to adjust to Callum Turner’s 1930s aesthetic and the London guy’s New York accent, he is likewise dynamite on screen. If the movie were even half as good as they are in it, it might be a romcom classic.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that Barbaro and Turner — despite being romantically involved with Andrew Garfield and Dua Lipa, respectively — have the box-office pull of Powell and Sweeney yet, the script is a mess, and the only theatrical releases anyone cares about right now involve Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal, so I expect One Night Only will likely fizzle out before finding an audience looking for comfort in streaming. And when it rolls around to Netflix or Prime Video, do watch it, if only to bask in their magnetism.

The premise? Well, it’s a dumb high-concept idea built around The Purge, but for sex. It’s set in a universe where the right-wing zealots have taken over and instituted a new mandate: Premarital sex is outlawed in America, except for during a 12-hour period once a year. Everyone has bio-sensors on their arms, and they’re only allowed to have sex when they turn green. It should feel like an apocalyptic New York, but that wouldn’t make for a very fun romcom, so it’s a brightly lit world where everyone just kind of goes along with it. Yes, the logistics of the premise are distracting, and yes, it’s hard to think about anything else for the first half hour. But Barbaro and Turner have a way of eventually taking your mind off of it.

Turner plays Owen, a pizza-shop owner who plans to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) on the Purge night, but because she hasn’t had the opportunity to sleep with other people in years, she opts to use the night to sleep with a neighbor. Owen is gutted, and heads out into the night in an attempt to f*** his feelings away. Barbaro plays Allie — a singer of pop songs retrofitted for prescription-medication ads. She goes out with her best friend to find a partner, only for her best friend to find a guy within the night’s first ten minutes and abandon her.

I had kind of expected Owen and Allie to find each other and spend the night walking around the city getting to know each other Before Sunrise-style, but that wouldn’t make for a particularly good comedy. Instead, Owen and Allie bump into each other several times over the course of the night while they’re attempting to hook up with other people, including at a bodega where they’re at an ATM trying to retrieve $200 to purchase what’s apparently the last condom in New York City (the mandate also requires that everyone wear protection, lest the country’s maternity wards all fill up at the same time 9 months after the mandate).

Over the course of the night, all of their hook-up attempts fail in various humiliating ways, but they keep accidentally running into each other until their encounters are eventually intentional. There are the usual romcom tropes, several cameos (Pete Davidson, Julia Fox, Bobby Cannavale, Ben Marshall, and a particularly memorable one from Levar Burton), a few genuinely funny moments, and a final sequence that’s legitimately delightful.

Look: I love a good romcom. I also love a bad romcom. I’m a sucker for the genre, but I can draw a distinction between a great one (Crazy Rich Asians, Voicemails for Isabelle) and a bad one (Anyone But You, 27 Dresses), and this one falls squarely in the The Idea of You or Set It Up category: A bad romcom elevated by magnificent leads and great chemistry.

In other words, turn green for the leads; stay red on the script.