Honey Don't!: In Which Margaret Qualley Plays a Rotary Dial Woman in a Touch-Screen World

HONEY DON'T! 

(Ethan Coen, 2025, USA, 

89 minutes) 

Writer/director Ethan Coen and co-writer/co-editor Tricia Cooke set themselves up for a very specific critique when they decided to title their second "lesbian B-movie" with Margaret Qualley Honey Don't! 

I get that it's a reference to a few different things: the 1956 Carl Perkins B-side (famously covered by the Beatles in 1964), Qualley's gumshoe character's name–Honey O'Donoghue–and Honey's rather heedless approach to romance, but the film's detractors are likely to describe the film as a "don't," as in "Don't go to this movie." I mean, it's right there in the title. 

I understand the impulse, but I'm not wild about cheap shots, and Qualley makes Coen and Cooke's black comic take on the sunshine noir or hardboiled detective story worthwhile–I just wish the film rose to her level.

It begins, as these things must, with a dead body. Disheveled Detective Marty Metakawich (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) assumes it was a suicide, but the prologue suggests that it may have been murder, or a  convenient accident for a Bakersfield evangelist (Chris Evans, most recently of The Materialists) with a sideline in various vices. 

Honey, who had recently met with the victim, is certain something hinky is going on, so she decides to look into it. Though she's openly gay, she doesn't use words like that. She simply tells the detective, "I like girls," but he's too dense or too besotted to take her meaning. Not even after she says it several more times.

Honey dresses like a George Cukor heroine in puff-sleeve dresses, crisp white shirts and beige trousers, red lipstick, and "clickety-clack high heels." She refuses to use a cellphone and stores her contact information in a Rolodex. She's a woman out of time, except she's unapologetically queer and as hot-to-trot as Jamie, Qualley's Drive-Away Dolls character. 

While looking into the mystery, for which no one appears to be paying her, Honey meets with potential clients, like an uptight germaphobe (Billy Eichner), who believes his partner is cheating on him. She also has a fling with the police department's evidence custodian (Aubrey Plaza). 

I wasn't bored by any of these developments, but I wasn't fully engaged either. The actors are game, but the writing hems them in. Evans' Reverend Drew, for instance, is a thoroughly repellant individual–greedy, self-obsessed, and narcissistic–but once that's established, the character has nothing left to offer other than an unseen comeuppance that isn't nearly as satisfying as it should be. For a more effective heel turn from Evans, look no further than Knives Out.  

Coen and Cooke also present bondage gear as something inherently shocking, except it feels more like kink-shaming, which probably wasn't their intention, though Honey's enthusiasm for sex toys, including the dildos and anal beads she washes with loving care, doesn't merit the same treatment. 

As with Drive-Away Dolls, their first narrative, Honey Don't! has a screwball vibe, but lacks the requisite energy. It isn't long, slow, or listless, but it's consistently behind the beat. Something is off. Coen and Cooke are working with some of the same ingredients as Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, but that lesbian noir had a sense of urgency this one lacks, though it shares a predilection for gory violence that crosses into horror-movie territory. 

Though the film doesn't do Evans or Plaza many favors, Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) shines as Honey's niece, a fast food worker and goth girl with lousy taste in boyfriends. 

Coen and Cooke don't give Ryder anything funny to say or do--to the extent that she seems to have wandered in from a different, possibly better, film--but she's genuinely sympathetic. When she disappears after an encounter with a strange old man (Kale Browne), the film comes to life in a way it hadn't previously before returning to the less interesting central mystery. 

The filmmaking duo intends to make a third film with Margaret Qualley called, um, Go Beavers, but it remains to be seen if they're able to pull it off. Drive-Away Dolls didn't exactly light up the box office, and Honey Don't! may not fare much better--not even after Qualley's dazzling turn in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance--but she certainly acquits herself nicely.

For me, the film isn't a "do" or a "don't" so much as a maybe.

   

Honey Don't! opens on Fri, Aug 22, at SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, the Meridian, and other area theaters. Images from Screen Rant (Margaret Qualley), Wikipedia (1956 Sun 78, "Honey Don't", Carl Perkins), the IMDb (Qualley and Aubrey Plaza), and Thought Catalog (Qualley and Plaza).