There is a particular failure of nerve that only befalls comedies about desire, and One Night Only walks straight into it. Will Gluck hands two of the most combustible young actors working, Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, a premise engineered entirely around sex, and then spends its runtime finding elegant ways not to have any. The heat the title promises is real. It just lives almost wholly in the faces of the leads, not in anything the screenplay is willing to let them do.

That distance, between how charged the two of them are and how chaste the movie around them stays, is the whole story of the picture, and it is why the sharpest phrase in the film’s early reception is aimed not at either star’s limits but at the film’s. The actors, runs the line, are too hot for this sexless sex. It reads like a swipe. It is closer to a diagnosis. Gluck has built a machine for withholding and then cast it with two people whose entire appeal is the promise of not withholding.

The conceit is high and deliberately silly. In a lightly dystopian New York, sex outside marriage has been outlawed and rationed down to a single sanctioned night a year, policed by biosensors that make the prohibition literal. It is a Purge of abstinence, and Gluck, as TheWrap observed, does as much world-building as a broad comedy can bear in order to keep the gag standing. Into it run Allie, a singer worn thin by empty encounters, and Owen, a pizzeria owner freshly discarded, the two people in the city, the film suggests, who want the night to mean more than the night was designed to allow.

As performance, they quietly rewrite what the script hands them. Barbaro, arriving off the awards season that finally put her name in lights, plays Allie as someone who needs the evening to signify; Turner gives Owen a rumpled, already-defeated tenderness. The air between them, as Screen Rant put it, crackles, and it is that crackle, not the plot’s contrivances, that keeps the film upright. This is the paradox at the centre of the movie’s craft: two actors supplying, through sheer presence, the erotic charge the writing keeps declining to earn.

Because the writing does decline it. For all the sex the premise dangles, the film stays oddly buttoned. Consequence flagged the tell, calling the picture relatively chaste, aligned with a not-so-subtle suggestion that premarital sex may not be the answer after all. That is a strange moral for a movie sold on a single legal night of hooking up, and it is where the read gets interesting. The horniness is all marketing and casting, while the text underneath is quietly, almost conservatively, on the side of restraint. The dystopia of enforced abstinence turns out to be the film’s own comfort zone.

Which is why the reception has split without quite disagreeing. The raves and the shrugs reach for the same paradox from opposite ends: everyone clocks that the leads outclass the vehicle, that the chemistry outperforms the concept. Even David Rooney, filing one of the film’s kinder verdicts, framed it as sweeter and sexier than its contrived script deserves. The compliment and the complaint are the same sentence.

Universal opens the film in theatres in early August, with Gluck, the writer-director behind Easy A, ringing his leads with his most crowded ensemble yet: Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton and Julia Fox all pass through. The R rating, as Consequence pointed out, is earned less by anything the film shows than by how freely everyone swears.

A movie about the scarcity of permission turns out to be scarce with what it permits. Barbaro and Turner spend two hours undressing a script that never once unbuttons, and the strange, watchable tension of One Night Only is entirely that mismatch.

Tags: Callum Turner, Monica Barbaro, One Night Only, Will Gluck, rom-coms