Romance movies are, on the whole, my favourite movie genre. But good romance movies, like good romantic relationships, are hard to find, and easy to mess up. It is hard to walk the line between too much (the near-pornographic 365 Days saga, for example) and too little (the chemistry-less Twilight series). Luckily, a filmmaker can make their own job a little easier through certain techniques which instantly boost the pheromones that their film gives off. One of the easiest is to set the film in a typically ‘romantic’ city, and few settings do more emotional heavy lifting than New York. It is a city which has produced some of the best romance films of all time; Will Gluck’s latest attempt to revive the rom-com genre, One Night Only, is not one of them.
The film’s premise is eyebrow-raising, to say the least: America is under a fascist government which mandates that unmarried people can only have sex on one night each year. It makes One Night Only into the kind of movie which is condemned to be remembered only by the lunacy of its premise, like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. One Night Only follows singles Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner) as they navigate The Night, and supposed ‘hijinks’ ensue. I would go into more detail about the plot, but about two-thirds of the way through, I felt my eyes glaze over as I waited desperately for the film to be over. It was both unromantic and unfunny, much like Will Gluck’s previous ‘rom-com’ Anyone But You (2023), starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, another pair of leads with no chemistry. What these films have in common, and the reason why they both fail, is their lack of actual romance. Both films are about two people who are not at all interested in one another, and are actively pursuing other people, until the final fifteen minutes. Both films attempt to create the ‘enemies to lovers’ trope, but have none of the sexual tension needed to make it work. The characters are essentially in two different plots for the entirety of the film, only crossing paths a few times across the night. And for a film about sex, One Night Only is as unsexy as it gets. Sex is everywhere in One Night Only as a concept – and as a source of panic – but almost nowhere as an expression of feeling. That might be fine if the film were more cynical, but it still wants the emotional reward of a traditional rom-com ending. The problem is that romance cannot just be switched on after ninety minutes of avoidance. A film can be chaste and feel charged; it can be explicit and feel completely dead. But One Night Only fails to commit in either direction, leaving a product with no sex, no desire, and no reason to watch. The film’s obsession with sex makes its lack of intimacy more obvious. Its fundamental problem is that it does not seem interested in desire as an emotional state, and instead uses it solely as a plot mechanism. The film is so focused on the flow of its events that it neglects the fact that romance, in films as in real life, needs time and attention. One Night Only does not so much revive the old rom-com as it does imitate its surface features. It has the attractive leads, and it has the energy of New York at night. But the old rom-com worked because it believed in its own emotional stakes. One Night Only feels embarrassed by romance, so it hides behind its premise.
It is clear that Gluck aimed to revive the once-beloved rom-com style of the ‘90s and ‘00s, but he ignores the reason why these films stopped being made in the first place. The truth is, being the lead in a cheesy rom-com is no longer a viable strategy for self-respecting actors – too many careers have been killed by bad rom-com movies. That is not to say that Turner and Barbaro are bad actors, but they are both relatively early-on in their careers as leads, with Eternity and A Complete Unknown having their respective biggest parts to date. If an actor is to pursue a romantic role, it is much more preferable to be in a dramatic, or ‘artsier’, movie, like Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name. Gluck’s films tend to hire first-time writers, unfortunately leading to disappointing scripts – the most important element of a ‘comedic’ movie. In short, Hollywood just doesn’t support rom-coms any more, and if One Night Only is the best the genre has to offer in 2026, I doubt that that will change any time soon.
Part of the genre’s lack of success among modern audiences may come from the increased cynicism towards ‘fairytale’ romances, which feel far removed from the newer social dynamics which define today’s relationships. In the case of One Night Only, the main problem young viewers seem to have found is how ‘straight’ it is: “I need straight people to be exiled”, reads one Letterboxd review. “Straight people want to be oppressed soooo bad”, reads another. Of course, Letterboxd is no longer the space for focused film criticism and discussion that it once claimed to be, but it is clear that people just do not resonate with this type of film anymore. For me, the film’s problem is not its ‘straightness’, but the reliance on the assumption that a man and a woman placed inside a high-concept premise will automatically generate romance.
So I cannot in good conscience recommend you see One Night Only. It made me sad. It made me wish I was watching a better movie. So instead, I will recommend a better movie about people finding love in New York at night: Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. It has all of the same ingredients as One Night Only, but uses them to create something with an immense level of charm – it understands what those ingredients are for. What Moonstruck understands, and One Night Only does not, is that romance is not the same thing as sex. Cher and Nicolas Cage do not need a dystopian law to make their attraction interesting, as the film gives them tender moments of loneliness and grief which humanise them, and allow the protagonists to properly understand one another. Yes, it may be melodramatic, but I’d rather that over the lifeless, unromantic energy of Gluck’s movies.
What the movie is ultimately missing is not attractive leads, or a unique premise, or attempts at comedy – it is sincerity. And that is what makes a romance worth watching. One Night Only is not proof that the rom-com is dead. But it is proof that a rom-com without romance is just a long night.
