IMAGINE planning your entire love life around a stopwatch.

That’s the cheeky engine powering One Night Only, the new theatrical rom-com starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro — a film that takes a simple, recognisable dating dilemma and cranks it into full dystopian farce. Its central conceit is as bold as it is absurdly specific: in this version of the United States, pre-marital sex has been outlawed.

Except, crucially, it isn’t banned all the time. Once a year, the chastity mandate lifts for twelve hours, and single citizens are allowed to “have at it”. It’s the kind of premise that instantly tells you what sort of ride you’re in for: high concept, deliberately heightened, and built for awkward timing, impossible decisions and romantic chaos.

Turner and Barbaro sit at the centre of this theatrical comedy set-up, which is already engineered for pressure-cooker romance. When a society tries to legislate intimacy — and then schedules a brief annual release valve — every flirtation becomes a negotiation, every connection becomes a logistical puzzle, and every moment comes with the ticking dread of the clock running out.

And then there’s the soundtrack, which isn’t content to behave like background mood music. One Night Only is packed with “knock-off jingles and singles,” a detail that suggests the film is as interested in satirising the culture around its premise as it is in playing the romance straight. Jingles, especially, have a way of worming into your head — and in a world where desire is policed and then temporarily permitted, that kind of catchy, commodified sound feels like a pointed choice.

It’s a rom-com gambit that understands the genre’s oldest trick: take a universal fear (missing your moment, choosing wrong, wanting someone at the wrong time) and build a whole world that forces the characters to confront it. With a twelve-hour window as the organising principle, the film can be silly, sharp, and uncomfortably close to real anxieties — all at once.

The best high-concept comedies don’t just invent rules; they use them to reveal personality. Here, the clock and the songs feel like they’re doing the same job: turning private longing into a loud, public spectacle — and daring its characters to find something real in the noise.