The ‘One Night Only’ Trailer Raised a LOT of Questions. Does the Movie Answer Them? - The Ringer

In the past month or so, something has been happening with movie trailers: They’re making me want to go see movies again. Whether actually seeing those movies is in my own best interest is a more complex story, but recently, a handful of trailers have stopped me in my tracks and made me ask things like: “OK, but what does that wicker dick do?,” “Did I miss that Chris Hansen was that blond and unhinged?,” and “Does this rom-com take place under a totalitarian government regime?” Over the past decade, since the majority of movies began spawning from established IP and franchise juggernauts, trailers have been widely criticized for laying out the entire plots of the movies they were supposed to be teasing. But before that time, trailers did things like build curiosity—and one recent example made me desperate for more information as it played ahead of my other moviegoing experiences, during my social media scrolls, and eventually, in my nightmares. One Night Only’s trailer begins with a premise I’d simply never considered before: “Finding love is hard—try doing it when single people are only allowed to have sex one night of the year.”  First of all: No, thank you! Second, this was the only non–Ben Affleck entity I’ve ever seen have Dunkin’ Donuts product placement in the trailer. After those initial thoughts, though, came a mental labyrinth of questions. Why would the romantic challenge of this rom-com be that it takes place on the one night of the year when single people are legally allowed to have sex—which is not so much a “misunderstanding” or a “race to open one’s heart up in time to let love in” as it is … creating an entirely new world of systems and ideologies under which our two protagonists are now tasked with falling in love? (Listen, many of my favorite rom-coms are based on high-concept premises that create unique stakes for their beloved characters, but this goes a little beyond Kat Stratford needing to date before her younger sister can, or Andie and Ben’s secretly opposing 10-day love schemes.)  Why—and more importantly, how—did writer Travis Braun and director Will Gluck plan to make a lighthearted rom-com set in what seems to be a fascist government state? Perhaps sensing my confusion, Gluck conducted a Reddit AMA last week, ahead of One Night Only’s premiere, where a lot of the questions were like, “Hey man, what the fuck is going on here?” To which he responded that his team “spent a lot of time talking about the rules of the world … but we didn’t want the movie to be about that.” Way too late on that front, Gluck.  Reddit Q&As aside, though, the only way to get answers to the questions this trailer raised was to—and you have to hand it to the marketing team on this one—actually go to see this movie. Which is how I ended up in an (admittedly packed) showing on Thursday night during which the audience spent most of the time alternating between tepidly laughing along with One Night Only’s stabs at satire and really laughing at the movie’s attempts to explain and evade its own premise in equal measure. So how did the movie itself back up the numerous queries its trailer raised? This is every question asked and answered—or more often, not answered—while watching One Night Only. I think it’s important to note that before One Night Only—the movie that makes you ask, “So when did tradwife TikTok fully storm the Capitol?”—Braun had created and written 46 episodes of Pupstruction. This is a sort of Paw Patrol fever dream that aired on Disney+ and followed Phinny, an innovative young corgi, on a dogs-only construction crew that proves you don’t need big paws to have big dreams. (Also, it’s a musical.) Before that, Braun had written 75 episodes of T.O.T.S., an animated series wherein Pip the Penguin and Freddy the Flamingo become the first ever non-stork employees of the Tiny Ones Transportation Service. It’s also a musical … So it’s safe to say that Braun was already dabbling in municipal governance and subversive public health services before One Night Only, but it’s unclear why, when he brought his head up for unanimated air, he said, “Let’s make this a little more federally mandated and a little more criminalized, and instead of The Purge, let’s get a couple of hotties on the horn and make The Urge.” But here we are.  No. This movie is entirely about not having sex and having access to condoms but not using them. This was the most abstinence-only-ass hour of my life, and I attended public school in Texas. As the title card at the beginning of the movie tells us (10 seconds in and already a huge laugh, pretty impressive honestly): “Three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the United States … Except for one night.” So sex has been criminalized for anyone who isn’t legally married, but for one night a year, the government tells those non-marrieds (their term, not mine): OK fine, you can fuck, but only because we said so. And listen, it’s not that far-fetched that a democratic government’s puritanical fearmongering could creep slowly enough toward facism that a society realizes it’s sitting inside a boiling pit of institutional corruption and federally mandated surveillance but can’t seem to get out. What is a little far-fetched is that a moviegoing audience wouldn’t want some explanation about how that society has been affected by that descent into fascism. “It’s been a lot,” says the third and final sentence of One Night Only’s opening chyron. And that’s the last time they’ll be addressing that—cue Callum Turner and that big-ass head, it's time for romance! Of course. Via a news clip that rolls in the background of a random scene, a U.S. senator says, “The American people wanted this mandate,” which is slightly contradicted by all of the “REPEAL” graffiti in the background of most of the movie. “Incels are celebrated now,” continues the senator, who’s described in Braun’s original script (available online because it did very well on The Black List in 2024) as “41, beard, Botox … definitely does not look exactly like JD Vance.” Not-JD-Vance goes on to say: “We wanted to go back to a time when sex was reserved for the sanctity of marriage.”  It’s not much, but it’s the most clarifying statement we get on why all of this came to be. ‘One Night Only’ and the 21st-Century Rom-Com Canon