It’s an age-worn notion: that dating in the here and now is a seemingly impossible task. In 2026, it seems the simple equation of boy-meets-boy-meets-girl-meets-girl is as thorny a question as it ever was, complicated by social media, dating apps and sometimes unpredictable goalposts.

It would not be fair to lay all the blame at the feet of Sex and the City, but there is no doubt that television and film romances - loaded with impossible expectations, simplistic outcomes and romantic poster boys like Big, whose flaws far outnumber their better qualities - has done a lot of damage in the dating world.

One Night Only, written by Travis Braun and directed by Will Gluck, is not a polemic on romantic fantasy and false hope, but it does, in 102 minutes, unpack some interesting questions about the vagaries of modern romance, the minefield of social and political shifts and just how hilariously hard it is to find someone to share a pizza with.

“I’m not sure that that’s necessarily just down to Hollywood,” says the film’s star, British actor Callum Turner. “We have Valentine’s Day, there’s a lot of pressure on Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Halloween. But that’s what this night is. It’s the pressure of all those wrapped into one.”

Turner’s co-star, San Francisco-born Monica Barbaro, concurs. “I feel like Sex in the City was actually really instrumental in taking some of the gauze off around sex and dating in New York, [but] the one thing that it did fail to be honest about for me as a kid was how easy it is to navigate the city in high heels,” Barbaro says, laughing.

“They made it seem like you could get away with just Manolo Blahniks on the average errand, and I got here and learned very quickly that the blisters will happen. I think that was the most unrealistic expectation. And that you can have an apartment in the West Village that is gorgeous and the closet to rival all closets.”

One Night Only is set in a very-near-future America, in a kind of parallel political reality. In this world, pre-marital sex has been outlawed.For singles, sleeping with someone is only legal on one night of the year. One Night Only is the story of that night.

Turner plays Owen, a likeable chap who works in a pizza restaurant and seems content in his relationship. He’s about to pop the question, when his fiancé asks for a hall pass for the night - the one night - so they can both try other people before settling on each other. She’s very keen. He seems crushed by the suggestion.

Barbaro plays Allie, who could have been the fifth member of the Sex and the City cast. She’s young, successful and happy, but she’s also adrift in the romantic world and can’t seem to get her life into gear. She intends to head out for the night - the one night - to see what might rise on the romantic horizon.

At first flush, this is light and charming. Certainly, Turner and Barbaro sparkle on screen together. But there is a powerful socio-political thread in the story, in the context of Trump’s America, in which legislation is creeping into choices around marriage, relationships and family.

In one scene, it is referred to as “the nationwide chastity mandate”, and in another, as “an ideological grenade thrown by old men who are not affected by it”. Which makes this … the first politically themed romcom?

“I think you can’t help but have political undertones with something like this,” says Barbaro. “I do think it does its job in not beating you over the head with that, but it feels recognisable when you see this New York City under this sort of extreme situation.

“What it does, as a plot point, is basically take a subject like dating and ramp up the stakes and the urgency and the desperation that I think a lot of people feel, in a slower burn, in their daily lives, particularly single people or unmarried people,” she says. “[To] people who are dating and trying to find a partner to be with for the rest of their lives ... this could potentially feel cathartic and really funny, or like a horror film.”

A Sliding Doors-style series of near misses sets up the potential romance between Owen and Allie. In that sense, the film riffs like the Martin Scorsese comedy After Hours (1985), the Richard Linklater romance Before Sunrise (1995) and even Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau romantic gay drama Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016).

That compression heightens the tension in every scene. “That’s the fun of it,” says Turner. “It’s the absurdity of the night. And placing yourself into that situation, it’s exhilarating because you are not acting from a normal standpoint. You’re acting from a standpoint that’s totally absurd.

“Then you’re given freedom as an actor to explore that rather than to shy away from it,” he adds. “What I think is so great about this is that there is just this propelling [force], this propulsion through the night. It’s more of an adventure movie in its structure than a traditional romcom. And then with the one night thing, it just adds this beautiful component that I really enjoyed playing.”

Barbaro says the intensity of the storytelling is juxtaposed with a sense that the clock is almost at a standstill because what happens in a matter of hours is, in fact, filmed over aperiod of months.

“The most challenging thing about shooting something for such a long period of time that takes place over one night is the fact that the continuity [requires you] to look exactly the same,” Barbaro says. “Wearing a sequin dress like that for months, it felt I was really ready to get out of it by the end.”

One of the film’s key sequences comes when Owen and Allie finally get to sit down and share a pizza. Turner was sent to pizza-making boot camp to prepare for the film, spending seven days of five-hour shifts in a busy New York pizzeria.

The scene connects deeply with the film’s underlying themes, asking perhaps whether, in the end, true love is often hiding in plain sight.

“There’s love all around us if we’re looking for it, that’s the manifestation thing, everything is available to you,” says Barbaro. “If you believe that it is in abundant supply around you, you start to see it more right in front of your face, and that’s a beautiful thing. And if you believe that there’s love all around you, you will find love all around you.

“In a way you can fall in love with everybody; I hesitate to say everybody, but I think people have many parts to them, and you can certainly fall in love with certain parts of anyone,” Barbaro adds. “As actors, we do it in a way all the time. What makes it easy to express that love is really adoring parts of the person in front of you and the way you feel about your character and connecting to their various parts and showing them for all of who they are.”

Which means that in the end, One Night Only, despite the casual sex wrapping, is really a story about falling deeply in love.

“I think that can be true, of course. And it can be true that it’s the opposite as well, that people love beautifully and unconditionally every single day,” says Turner. “Allie and Owen, they have a complex start. They have this coming together, this near miss, and as you said, this Sliding Doors thing.

“And then they have this cosmic joke that the universe was playing on both of them,” Turner adds. “I always felt that Owen recognised it first. And in that scene, what I found to be heartbreaking was that he was still attached, of course, to someone that he’d been with for three years, even though she dumps him on the day to have sex with someone else.

“So he meets this person, on this night, and it could end in a friendship, it could end in nothing, or it could end in true love.”

One Night Only is released on August 13.