REVIEW: One Night Only - sex-ban anti-fantasy is oddly enjoyable

One Night Only is co-written, directed and produced by Will Gluck, based on a script by Travis Braun.

And between them, they set themselves an almighty challenge: to create an even vaguely human drama out of the weirdest and most preposterous of premises.

The opening credits inform us that we are now in a world where the US has banned all pre-marital sex except for 12 hours once a year. Or as one of the characters puts it, you’re not to go “playing slap and tickle without a ring on your finger.”

There are protests happening in the background, but their voices aren’t particularly heard. Instead, it seems that most people have pretty much accepted the directive, all part of reducing unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmitted disease.

But the predictable upshot in this new and strange, strange world is that once a year, the price of condoms goes through the roof and pretty much everyone hits the streets in search of sex. Presumably the government is happy with the short-lived but intense orgy it has unwittingly unleashed.

Owen (Callum Turner) is rather hoping it will mean intimacy with his girlfriend (Maya Hawke), but she’s got other ideas, preferring instead to ring the changes – which leaves him at a loose end, which is the moment he bumps into Allie (recent Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro) who is in a similar situation.

Initially and distinctly oddly, they don’t see their solution in each other. In fact, they keep getting separated. Even weirder, they keep bumping into each other again. Are they ever going to realise that something is propelling them towards each other?

You quickly hope so – because there’s clearly something starting to happen between them, and that’s the most attractive part of the whole film, indeed the most normal part of a film which is bafflingly bonkers in most other respects.

And it’s their relationship which will carry you through to its end – an ending, weirdest of all, which actually seems to condone the whole notion of the sex ban.

Has the romcom story well really been used up to the extent that film-makers now have to dream up such strange anti-fantasies? Who knows. But this is a film which, despite itself, wins you over strongly.