The moment came during test screenings. Will Gluck, director of the new romantic comedy One Night Only, watched as audiences physically recoiled whenever two naked people appeared on screen mid-scene. "You're engaged in the characters and what's going on, and then you pan over and there's two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience... it's a physical thing," he explained to Variety. So he kept editing. "I cut out so much," he said. "There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets."

The film, written by Travis Braun, imagines an alternative America in which premarital sex is outlawed for 364 days a year, leaving single people just 12 hours annually to hook up - a premise widely compared to The Purge. Everyone wears a sensor on their wrist so police can track and arrest anyone who attempts sex outside the permitted window; singles also receive small tattoos that turn from red to green when the clock allows, measuring oxytocin, dopamine and proximity to other wearers. On the night itself, New York's streets flood with couples making out on every corner, and the aspiring lovers have twelve hours to find their soulmate.

Gluck, whose credits include Easy A and Anyone But You, said he studied empirical data on how Gen Z and Gen Alpha don't want to see sex on screen. His explanation: because people are now constantly exposed to intimate content on their own phones, such scenes have become "more of a private, intimate thing that people don't want to see when they're in a shared experience." He also said he used an intimacy coordinator for the romance scenes and cast real-life couples already familiar with each other to act in them.

Reviews have been polarised. Benjamin Lee in The Guardian argued that the premise ought to be "the set-up for a grim Handmaid's Tale-adjacent horror of a totalitarian state insisting extreme control over the body, but instead it's used as the backdrop for a sunny meet-cute." Others were kinder: Variety's Guy Lodge praised the "two attractive, pleasingly grown-up leads," and Fox News found the result "thoroughly entertaining."

The film leaves a curious afterimage: a city where everyone wears a sensor, tattoos bloom green once a year, and the director keeps cutting until the audience stops squirming. Its most intimate scenes exist only as absence - the street-shot nudity Gluck removed frame by frame.