The Dystopia of Modern Singlehood

The bars are flooded with single people dressed in their sexiest getups and looking vaguely uncomfortable.

Each of them is smiling a little too wide, trying a little too hard: They want to leave with one of these strangers, stat.

Pair off too fast, and they might get stuck with someone insufferable; wait too long, and they might ride the subway home alone at 3 a.m., trying not to stare at the happy couples sloppy-French-kissing.

Quick: Is this the plot of One Night Only , or is this a random Friday night in a major city? The new film by Will Gluck, who also directed such rom-com smashes as Easy A and Anyone but You , follows a decidedly bonkers premise: The U.S. government has outlawed premarital sex.

It uses biosurveillance to enforce the ban, tracking people’s dopamine, serotonin, and testosterone levels and alerting law enforcement when two singles show hormone spikes at the same time.

The only exception is during one 12-hour window every year: a night when unmarried horndogs run wild, dry humping in the streets like 17-year-olds.

Owen (played by Callum Turner) thinks he’ll spend the evening with his girlfriend—until she announces that she wants to embrace her one chance to “explore,” meaning sleep with someone else. (He then decides to do some exploring of his own.) Allie (Monica Barbaro) begrudgingly goes out with her friend to find a partner for the night—until that friend immediately splits with a guy she just met, leaving Allie alone in a sea of deeply off-putting suitors.

One Night Only is obviously not a work of realism, even when you ignore the questionable science.

For one thing, if strangers in bars talked to one another this much, America might not be in a romance slump .

The vibes in this fictional Manhattan are exuberantly randy—unlike in the world we actually occupy, where Gluck reportedly had to cut nudity out of the film because test audiences reacted so negatively to it.

When people can have sex only one night a year, the film implies, they lust hard. (“Maybe the fascists were right about this one,” a peripheral character offers.) But One Night Only does capture something true about the anxieties and pressures of modern singlehood.

The prospects can seem both abundant and astoundingly unappealing.

Not trying feels like missing an opportunity, but trying might be worse; Allie wants a real connection but doesn’t assume it will be easy to find.

And she’s skeptical that a fling could be all that fun if it’s with a person she’s not excited about.