Honey Don’t! – Film Review

Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! arrives as the second installment in his and Tricia Cooke’s so-called “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” following 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls. Where that earlier film leaned into road-movie absurdity, this one aims squarely at the smoky intrigue of neo-noir, layering its pulp sensibilities with a dark comedic edge. Yet, while the premise is enticing and the film features a lively cast anchored by Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, and Chris Evans, the execution is uneven. The result is a stylish but frustrating experience: part playful homage, part muddled crime saga, part character study that never quite finds its footing.

At its heart, Honey Don’t! follows private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Qualley) as she navigates a tangle of murder, cultish religion, and personal demons in Bakersfield, California. Coen sets out to build a world that feels both seedy and heightened, rooted in noir conventions but skewed by deadpan humor and queer subversion. Honey is a classic gumshoe reimagined — sharp, sardonic, and unapologetically herself — while Aubrey Plaza’s homicide detective MG Falcone brings a menacing unpredictability that crackles against Qualley’s performance. Add in Chris Evans as a charismatic but crooked preacher and Charlie Day as a bumbling fellow detective, and the ensemble seems primed for sharp, biting interplay.

And for stretches, the film delivers. Coen’s dialogue, co-written with Cooke, has flashes of the acerbic wit that defined the Coen brothers’ earlier work. There are moments of inspired humor that come from characters talking past each other, or from the absurd collisions between banal settings and violent deeds. A barroom exchange between Honey and MG, for instance, captures that blend of menace and comic awkwardness the film is aiming for. The Bakersfield backdrop, shot with dusty intimacy, adds an appealingly off-kilter sense of place.

Yet the noir mystery that drives the story struggles under the weight of its own intricacy. Coen layers in cult leaders, drug smuggling operations, estranged family members, and multiple murder threads, but instead of converging with satisfying precision, these elements often feel scattered. Where a tighter film might build toward a slow-burn revelation, Honey Don’t! juggles so many tones and subplots that its central investigation never generates the sustained tension a neo-noir should. Scenes that ought to simmer — a detective’s suspicion, a dangerous confrontation — are instead undercut by either excess exposition or tonal shifts into absurdity that feel more distracting than daring.

The humor, too, is uneven. While Drive-Away Dolls embraced camp, Honey Don’t! aims for a darker, nastier comedy. This means the jokes often hinge on cruelty, violence, or awkward sexual tension. Sometimes this works — Plaza, with her deadpan delivery, is particularly adept at wringing laughs from discomfort — but other times the humor feels forced, even clashing with the film’s bleaker narrative turns. Instead of finding a seamless fusion between noir grit and Coen-esque comedy, the film oscillates uncomfortably between them.

Performance-wise, the cast is the film’s saving grace. Margaret Qualley proves once again she’s one of the most compelling young actors working today. Her Honey O’Donahue is quirky yet hardened, at once jaded by her line of work and refreshingly unapologetic in her sexuality. She carries the film with an off-kilter charisma that makes even the clunkiest stretches of dialogue land with some flair. Aubrey Plaza, meanwhile, is riveting as MG — her unpredictable energy perfectly suited to a role that blends menace and vulnerability. Watching Plaza’s MG spar with Qualley’s Honey provides many of the film’s highlights.

Chris Evans, in a rare turn away from clean-cut hero roles, clearly relishes the chance to play sleazy. As Reverend Drew, he straddles charm and smarm with just enough menace to make him an effective antagonist. While his storyline sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of competing plotlines, Evans’ performance stands out as one of the film’s more confident pieces. Charlie Day, by contrast, feels miscast. His comic rhythms, while familiar, don’t always mesh with the film’s darker tone, often pulling scenes into broad comedy when they might benefit from restraint.

Visually, Honey Don’t! has plenty going for it. Cinematographer Ari Wegner bathes Bakersfield in sun-bleached malaise, contrasting strip-mall ugliness with sudden bursts of shadowy menace. There are sequences — a quiet stalk through suburban streets, a blood-soaked confrontation in a church — that demonstrate Coen’s knack for staging memorable images. Still, the visual polish can’t fully disguise the structural weaknesses. Where earlier Coen brother films like Blood Simple or Fargo balanced violence and comedy with precision, Honey Don’t! feels like a jumble of striking moments rather than a cohesive vision.

Perhaps the film’s biggest shortcoming lies in its emotional stakes. Noir thrives on desperation, on characters driven by obsession or entrapment, yet Honey Don’t! often feels oddly detached. Honey herself, though amusing, is more observer than participant in much of the chaos, and the script doesn’t fully flesh out her personal arc beyond surface-level nods to family estrangement and professional frustration. Attempts to layer in heavier themes — cycles of abuse, queer identity, generational trauma — are intriguing but handled too bluntly to resonate. They become just another set of ingredients in an already overstuffed stew.

By the film’s final act, Honey Don’t! swings for shocking twists and cathartic confrontations, but because the buildup has been so uneven, these climactic turns feel rushed rather than revelatory. The ending hints at a playful setup for the trilogy’s final entry, but it’s difficult not to feel that this chapter leaves more dangling threads than satisfying closure.

As part of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” Honey Don’t! represents an admirable attempt to experiment with genre, pushing queer women into the traditionally hetero-masculine world of noir. The idea of reclaiming pulp archetypes and reimagining them through a queer lens is rich with potential, and at times the film’s commitment to that mission is exciting. Yet the execution falters. Where Drive-Away Dolls leaned into its camp with a breezy confidence, Honey Don’t! feels weighed down by the competing impulses to be both grimly serious and absurdly funny.

In the end, Honey Don’t! is a messy but intermittently entertaining experiment. Fans of the Coens’ darker sensibilities will find flashes of the old brilliance in the dialogue and character work, but the film too often feels like a rough draft rather than a finished statement. Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza make it worth watching, but the film itself struggles to justify its ambition.