The More You Think About One Night Only, The Harder It Is to Believe Gay People Would Be OK

Written down on paper, the world of One Night Only is a harrowing one. A conservative government and an opportunistic tech industry have colluded to implant mandatory biochips in people’s wrists that surveil their sexual activity, with carceral consequences for anyone who does the deed outside of marriage — except for a single night of the year when all bets are off. It’s the sort of premise that could make for a great 1984-style thriller with a forbidden love story — but instead Easy A director Will Gluck presents it as a sort of mildly zany social backdrop for an otherwise breezy, aughties-style romantic comedy.If you ignore the political implications, this movie is actually quite fun, as Them contributor Mathew Rodriguez and I found out together on its opening weekend. Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro play two unlucky singles who keep bumping into each other throughout an After Hours-style series of misadventures on the one night a year when they can legally have sex. The leads have genuine chemistry, the situational comedy is amusing, and there’s even some laugh-out-loud-funny parodies of pharmaceutical company pop song rewrites (think: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!”). But ignoring the political implications is, well, impossible. Indeed, the suspension of disbelief requires a level of effort on par with not having sex 364 days a year.As a queer and transgender person who loves movies, I had a great time watching One Night Only. I also could not stop thinking about the fate of my people in this universe. The film tries to hand-wave away all matters LGBTQ+ via a side character — gay best friend Arya, played by Quintessa Swindell — who says something to the effect of, “We’ve been skirting around straight people’s laws since before the Bible.” But if that were the case, why wouldn’t horny heterosexuals use the same workarounds? And why do so many group shots of bars and events include same-sex couples pawing at each other with total desperation?