Callum Turner has another movie on the horizon alongside persistent rumors that he will slip on James Bond’s tuxedo whenever that might happen. It is quite an eyebrow-raising prospect. Coming in hot behind news of Taron Egerton’s upcoming comedy-thriller Everybody Wants to F**k Me, in which every woman stalks him and wants to have sex with him, comes One Night Only. In this film, Rose of Nevada actor Turner stars opposite Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro as a pair of strangers who end up together on their least favorite night of the year. That night is the only time pre-marital sex is allowed. In their world, pre-marital sex is otherwise outlawed under a long-standing rule that nobody remembers being put in place. For this specific time period, from 7 pm to 7 am the following morning, single people can sleep together.
Links have been drawn between this premise and the 2013 action horror film The Purge, starring Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, where one day a year all crime, including murder, is legal. However, writer-director Will Gluck is hesitant to embrace the comparison fully. “It’s less about the act of having sex and more about the pursuit of it,” he told EW. “So I guess if you were going to make this analogous to The Purge, it would be like spending 12 hours deciding who to murder, as opposed to committing the murder itself.” A fair point, but it still describes a high-pressure situation with just hours to potentially find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, or at least are stuck on enough to marry. Gluck also says he “steers away” a little from talk of The Purge because “you’re not going to see orgies and nudity everywhere. That’s not the movie.”
Instead, Allie (A Complete Unknown’s Barbaro) and Owen (Turner) end up together after wandering New York’s streets alone. They are two “lost souls” who have been ghosted on this most notable of nights: Allie by her best friend, who has hooked up with a stranger, and Owen by his girlfriend, who decides she wants to spend her one night of pre-marital sex with someone else. This happens brutally just as Owen was about to propose. Barbaro acknowledges the “kind of crazy premise” of One Night Only but reckons it is not that far from the realities and pressures of modern-day dating. “It’s kind of an allegory for dating and how intense it can be when you’re seeking true connection with somebody. I feel like it’s deeply relatable. It’s just supercharged in this one-night premise,” she told the publication.
Turner is coming off another strong rom-com, Eternity with Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller, and enjoys the genre trope that Owen and Allie keep being forced together, even though they do not want to be. “The universe is banging both of them over the head by putting them together over and over and over again on this one crazy night that they both hate,” Turner says, comparing it to a cosmic joke. The movie’s cast is also set to include ’80s rom-com queen Molly Ringwald, Maya Hawke, Julia Fox, Este Haim, and LeVar Burton. One Night Only is scheduled for US release on August 7, 2026. It has yet to receive a UK release date.
