Event: Communion

In his recent memoir, Communion, JD Vance talks about feeling “profoundly sad for today’s kids” navigating the dating scene. “Hookup culture wasn’t good in a lot of ways,” he writes. “It wasn’t exactly a perfect example of Christian sexual ethics. But the mistakes you saw people make were normal mistakes. The kind of things you learned from, talked to your friends about, maybe cried over.” The old, familiar nemesis of hookup culture has been replaced by the bleak reality of meat-market dating apps, an endless buffet of online pornography, and algorithmically amplified gender-war content. Vance is not the only conservative who feels a begrudging nostalgia for the errors of yesteryear. If there’s one small consolation, it’s that many agree we’ve hit a cultural dead end; surely something has got to give. One Night Only, out in theaters nationwide, offers its own wild take on what’s gone wrong. What if, it dares to ask, a world in which there are no rules and restrictions around sex is, in fact, less sexy—not to mention less fulfilling—than a world that treats sex as something powerful, crazy-making, even a little bit dangerous? The film is a love letter to New York City; an overt criticism of dating app culture and Big Tech overreach; a gently mocking middle finger to the public health establishment; and either the most red-blooded apologia for purity culture or the most subtly reactionary depiction of hookup culture since HBO’s Girls went off the air. It is, in short, a very First Things sex comedy. The setup is straightforward enough. Three years prior to the events of the film, Congress passed a “mandate” that makes sex outside of marriage illegal for 364 days of the year. The film takes place entirely on the one Bacchanalian night when the mandate is lifted.…