A lithe woman with jet-black hair and skin-tight, leopard-print pants stands like a mannequin sentry at the top of a hill overlooking a vast desert. Her slinky footsteps lead directly, as if on a magnetized path, to a freshly crashed car. Flipped over, no one around for miles in any direction, the car carries a dead woman, still strapped in. Without skipping a beat, the seductress approaches the vehicle, grabs a lifeless hand, removes a ring, and the camera cuts in on the insignia: a bejeweled cross, the symbol of the Four-Way Temple. Leave it to a Coen brother to pull off a killer opening, one of the year’s best, even if the rest of the movie doesn’t work.
Written, produced, and edited by married couple and longtime collaborators Tricia Cooke (lead editor of every Coens film since The Big Lebowski) and Ethan Coen—and effectively co-directed by Cooke, based on the way the two explained their collaboration on their last press tour—Honey Don’t! is less peripheral, but much more slight, than their first, Drive-Away Dolls.
The second picture in the duo’s lesbian B-movie trilogy, Honey Don’t! follows Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley)—a private investigator in Bakersfield, California during an ambiguous time period that looks equal parts classic noir and modern America—as she traces the clues of a series of murders that point to a charismatic Christian cult leader who looks and sounds an awful lot like the average American evangelical pastor. Chris Evans, in his first worthwhile role since Knives Out, is the best part of the movie as the utterly despicable Reverend Drew Devlin.
Honey Don’t! introduces the good reverend in the bedroom, mid-sex, dominating a member of his congregation with cult-like orgasmic cries. He’s the kind of pastor who encourages his church body to “submit vigorously to god,” by which he means his loins and wallet. A smuggler, dealer, killer, and all around reprehensible guy, Devlin has an apathetic bent to his ministry, ready to shoot any congregant on sight if they ingest his precious substances. On Sunday mornings, he’s flanked at the pulpit by two massive paintings of himself (a cinematic extension of Evans pricelessly admiring his own photo in Not Another Teen Movie), one with glasses and one without, both glowing in a celestial light.
When the couple approached scripts for their first film together, Cooke said they “actually looked at both Drive-Away Dykes and Honey Don’t! and thought Drive-Away Dykes had more humor in it.” They were right. Honey Don’t! is not very funny. It’s more of a smirker, but the occasional bit lands with real comic weight, like the call and response established between Honey and fellow horny detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day doing exactly what you’re expecting), the station’s resident moron. Straight as a frat party, he asks Honey out every day at work, only to receive the same response as she shrugs him off: “I like girls.” “You always say that!” he complains with a huge smile, hope still bubbling beneath the surface.
A titillating cast on paper, Qualley, Day, and Evans are joined by Aubrey Plaza—who plays Honey’s butch cop fling, MG Falcone—Billy Eichner, and Talia Ryder, all of whom are doing the most they can with the material, which just isn’t strong enough to let the performances shine. Outside of a handful of nice frames—like the sprawling oil rig shot underneath the production cards in the trailer—the likes of which are too few and far between to elevate the material, Honey Don’t! offers little to look at, listen to, or remember. The cinematography and production design are spare to a fault, the characters thin, the exposition quippy at best. It’s a film noir puzzle, but Coen and Cooke never spin a mystery out of the supposed secret matter at the film’s core.
The bleary-bright Bakersfield aesthetic is juicy territory for Coen and Cooke, who have worked together to bring audiences some of the most unforgettable depictions of the dusty American West in cinema, including No Country For Old Men, Raising Arizona, True Grit, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? But they can’t find the intrigue in deadbeat Bakersfield like they could in the equally, if not more, sparse Fargo, for example. Where the parasitic ennui of frozen North Dakota provided uniquely rich narrative and thematic landscapes for a gruesome murder case, the sheet metal churches and industry-where-culture-should-be of Bakersfield amounts to little more than a bleak background.
If one thing has become abundantly clear about the Coen brothers since they went their separate ways, it’s that Ethan was bringing the B-movie and Joel was bringing the cinema. (That’s reductive, of course, but their first fiction project choices and executions—Drive-Away Dolls versus The Tragedy Of Macbeth—tell the story well enough.) Both are essential to the duo’s unparalleled collective style, but, unmoored, Ethan’s sensibilities stray, or perhaps stop at the first idea they arrive at. (It’s worth noting his return to the stunning Blood Simple typeface here for the title.)
Take the opening credits sequence, an interesting experiment in plastering credits on the outside of buildings like they’re store names, sure, but one that wheezes out immediately under the needledrop, The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” a great song that does nothing for the sequence but sink it. It’s Coen’s job to clock that, to keep looking. The song makes sense lyrically, but, atmospherically, in concert with the footage, it’s gratingly dull, a tumbleweed of a soundtrack choice.
While still significantly less minor than the hardly existent Jerry Lee Lewis documentary that marked the beginning of Coen’s directorial career detached from his brother, Honey Don’t! doesn’t feel like it received the level of creative consideration given to Drive-Away Dolls. The latter was a small movie, yes, but one overflowing with lighting, editing, and character choices—ripe for loving or hating, but at least enough to evoke a reaction. Honey was made as limply as Coen and Cooke suggest it was: “We just wanted to do something that was kind of fun and carefree and didn’t take itself too seriously.”
Director: Ethan Coen
Writer: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
Release Date: August 22, 2025
