Honey Don’t! (2025)

*/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
directed by Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have a mission, and that mission is apparently to make affected, arch neo-noir “comedies” showcasing angry cunnilingus and the sense of humour that, in tiny doses, gave Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel a soupçon of bitterness. Without what seems to be Joel’s humanism to leaven what appears to be Ethan’s misanthropy, the residue left at the bottom of this cup is bitter to the point of repugnant. Flying solo, Ethan comes across as the kind of kid who inflates a toad to pop it with a slingshot for yuks. In some ways, Honey Don’t! is a definitive film for our era of nihilism, this generation of people becoming dead inside. It’s an endurance challenge, our Freddy Got Fingered, a sociopath by any other name. Remember that scene in Fargo where the wife tries to run away from her captors with her hands tied behind her back and her head covered by a hood? How she stumbles around in a confused circle before tripping and falling, causing kidnapper Steve Buscemi to laugh uproariously? Imagine an entire movie that is just that. Cruel. Mean. Tying-tin-cans-to-a-dog’s-tail mean. It’s aggressively nasty in a way I find punishing, and it’s scary because I suspect Coen and Cooke have enrichment on their minds. I think they’re doing this to force the “normies” to put some respect on alternative lifestyles. I think they’re doing it because they think the way to do that is to push our noses into our own sick.

Private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) has an insatiable eye for the ladies and a dead body that may be connected to sleazy evangelist the Reverend Devlin (Chris Evans). If Ethan and Cooke’s previous collaboration, Drive Away Dolls, was their Crumb-ian reboot of Raising Arizona, this is their redux of The Big Lebowski, an amiable take on Chandler’s drunken-but-literate gumshoe melodrama, as sub-John Waters camp provocation. Consider the rationale behind setting the film in the Republican enclave of Bakersfield and naming the BDSM-addicted villain “Devlin” of the “Four-Way Temple.” It’s so cartoonishly malicious, so obvious in the targets of its rancour, that it lands with the satirical subtlety of a full-volume firehose. Worse, the picture is so eager to make whatever point it’s trying to make that it (accidentally?) suggests women become lesbians because of bad fathers while Basic Instinct-ing its central love story into a serial-killer-bitch-be-cray twist that likewise does the LGBTQ+ community no favours. As it happens, it also does Aubrey Plaza no favours as evidence-cage cop MG Falcone (seriously). MG is both victim and victimizer in Honey Don’t!, introducing herself to Honey in a crowded bar with a rough finger-bang before eating her out back home with a ferocity that’s less romantic than it is pissed-off. It plays like cis-created lesbian porn, which I can’t believe is the point–unless the point is that straight people never get gay sex right, in which case, um…good point?

Maybe the message is that gay sex can be as joyless and violent as straight sex. In that case, what Honey Don’t! has successfully communicated is that gay sex is joyless and violent and can lead, eventually, to a murderous psychotic break in triggering barely suppressed memories of the profound child abuse that probably made them gay in the first place. If Tricia Cooke didn’t identify as a lesbian, I might be appalled. Since she does, and since she and Ethan have stated their intention of doing a gay genre trilogy (with Qualley, evidently, as the linchpin), I can only conclude that Honey Don’t! is a satire of the antiquated gender/sexual-preference attitudes that have always informed films noir. It is, in simpler terms, playing four-dimensional chess, and I’m way too stupid to get it. What I do get is that Devlin’s exploitation of his congregation is made to be a joke in which the women he’s joylessly abusing are framed as children, idiots, and floosies. I got the distinct feeling throughout that Coen and Cooke believe all of the movie’s victims deserve what’s coming to them. A ménage à trois with two extras left over from Exit to Eden ends with a vicious execution and a throwaway one-liner from the good Reverend about how useless his victims were in avoiding their demise. This follows the brutal dragging death of a gay man, Colligan (Christian Antidormi), who is first beaten for making a pass at the wrong man in a parking lot. Satire? A stab at how dangerous this world is, at this particular time, for this particular community? I guess. A pretty good example of how bad the current media is for them, too, as it happens. Good job. I have to question a cure that leaves no survivors.

Fortunately, there’s Qualley. Her Honey O’Donahue is world-weary, and Qualley handles the zippy screwball dialogue like Jennifer Jason Leigh in her Hudsucker Proxy prime. The best thing about Honey Don’t! is Honey’s interplay with clueless detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), her constant rebuffs of his guileless come-ons with a “Didn’t I tell ya? I like girls!” the one running joke that comes loaded with meaningful sociological weight. As Honey, Qualley does less boggling, less peacocking, than I’ve come to expect. She’s self-possessed at last. A grown-up, and a mesmerizing one, who suggests depth and complexity, intelligence and a palpable, lived-in pain, though all Honey Don’t! wants from her is community theatre. She’s so good in this, I spent most of the film wishing it were better. Not for my sake, but for Honey’s. I imagined her in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Evan Morgan’s The Kid Detective, David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake. I imagined her in the Wachowskis’ magnificent Bound, and Almodóvar’s lilting Pain and Glory. Honey Don’t! resembles all of these movies in turn. You keep thinking it’s about to get better, only to realize that’s just Qualley earning her stardom. Honey Don’t! is a contemptuous film that’s contemptuous of you. It thinks so little of its audience, in fact, that it punishes its characters to teach us a cautionary lesson about our callous insensitivity. At least it’s got “irony” nailed.