One Night review: this unusual blind date romance is gentle, affecting and pleasingly honest
Filmed in “real time” over the five hours between 8pm and 1am, 2018 mini-series One Night (Britbox) loosely follows in the footsteps of shows including 24, Him and Her and State of the Union. But in its deft, affecting illustration of two strangers slowly falling for one another, it most closely resembles Richard Linklater’s glorious Before cinematic trilogy, without ever quite reaching the same heights of either chin-stroking pretension or swooning romance.
That said, it does involve an attractive, young-ish couple (Downton Abbey’s MyAnna Buring and Gísli ?rn Garearsson, most recently seen in Netflix’s Ragnarok) doing a lot of walking and talking around a capital city (Oslo, in this case), their conversations digging into both the profound (relationships, grief, solitude, honesty) and trivial (skateboarding, phone etiquette, how to order food, wearing velvet).
There are also quotes opening each of the 10 episodes – Alphonse de Lamartine, TS Eliot, Charles M Schultz, Jackie Collins – that suggest both lofty intellectual ambitions and ironic hipster sensibilities.
Elizabeth and Jonas are on a blind date. She is a waitress, edgy, out and about only reluctantly and clearly still traumatised by a recent, deeply toxic relationship; he is a carpenter, smart and curious but his effusiveness about settling down seemingly rather compromised by furtive trips to the toilet to make a series of texts and phone calls.
The brainchild of ?ystein Karlsen and Kristopher Schau, One Night could hardly be more different to their respective previous work, the deeply eccentric Sopranos-in-Norway Lilyhammer and therapy-comedy Dag. The bone-dry misanthrophy and pitch-black humour of those series is here replaced by a more world-weary cynicism.
The potentially gimmicky real-time angle is used to allow Buring and Garearsson the time and space to create plausible characters with relatable problems, along with the sort of awkward silences that will be familiar to almost anyone who has become aware that their date is going sour.
It's not without its flaws: plaintive balladry intrudes on the soundtrack and occasional forays into a caper-y thriller don't come off, but neither happen often enough to matter. Encounters with an assortment of cyphers across the evening highlight faultlines in any potential relationship – a man on the razz hours after his first child is born, another thrown out of his apartment for infidelity, exes landing in their midst like hand grenades.
But it all builds towards an ending that is pleasingly honest and low-key, and wholly appropriate for a series that excels when keeping it simple.