Tuesday, 19 May 2026
Honey Don’t! (2025, dir. Ethan Coen)
Honey Don’t! is a 2025 neo-noir comedy that has been on my list since before it was released and, at least on paper, totally seems like my thing. It follows PI Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) investigating a series of disappearances that seem to be connected to the local cult led by Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans). Along the way, she ends up looking for her missing niece and starts seeing a local police officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza). Set in an aesthetically-focused view of Bakersfield, California, the movie definitely takes on that noir dreaminess, where the mystery so often fortuitously unfolds based on the detective’s whereabouts and personal life.
I will just put it out there now: Margaret Qualley carries this movie to an unfathomable degree. She plays this restrained, vintage-clad lesbian PI who I was just immediately charmed by. All of the characters are such characters, but Qualley’s performance is coherent in a way that feels very notable. The film is sort of gag- or goof-focused in a way that occasionally distracts, and I won’t pretend like the casting didn’t play a large part in creating this feeling; while Qualley is funny as Honey, what she brings to the role allows for a more consistent thread than the patchwork gags allow. And she is so, so charming; I’d watch a whole series of Honey easy.
As for the rest of the film, it has excellent aesthetic sensibilities and worldbuilding. The pieces are surely all there, an interconnected mystery with a noir sense in a contrastively mundane setting. The mystery definitely seemed less urgent, Honey’s personal life taking up much more of the screen time, but this is also what worked for me about the film. With that said, the movie admittedly let me down at critical moments. Although I liked the interpersonal drama, the mystery Honey was solving and the way it tied it felt lackluster. The serendipitous and formless blending of the plotlines felt more disjointed than dreamy. Thinking about the movie both before and after, I like it more than I actually felt while watching it. If it has cool bones and pretty paint, the film’s drywall is seriously lacking.
Despite my moderate disappointment, I’m still eager to continue with Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” I have relaxed expectations based on what I’ve seen of the other film that’s been released, but I can’t deny the concepts get me.