“Finding love is hard enough. Try doing it on the one night a year single people are legally allowed to have sex.” Like many of the chronically online, I’ve been thinking about this baffling voiceover—which can be heard in the first trailer for a romantic comedy starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro called One Night Only—for, oh, the past four months. And my thoughts barely quieted when I finally had a chance to see this highest of high-concept movies, which, yes, takes place in a dystopian society where premarital sex has been outlawed. It’s easy to suspend disbelief when you’re being thoroughly entertained—there’s nothing in the rule book that says a dog can’t play basketball! But it’s a lot tougher to calm your inner pedant when a film’s charms can’t outweigh its ludicrous premise. Luckily, I had an absolute blast picking apart One Night Only in an attempt to understand how its world works—and I hope you’ll enjoy reading my exegesis as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Elsewhere in VF, beloved auteur Gregg Araki makes the case for sex (and not just on one night a year!) in an interview with Marisa Meltzer, and Clara Molot untangles the curious case of AI hedge fund wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner. More tomorrow!
