‘Honey Don’t!’ Review: Ethan Coen’s Pulpy, Irreverent Crime Detour

When filmmakers who usually work as a team go their separate ways, certain patterns tend to emerge. In the case of the Coen brothers, beyond any debate about their respective talents, it becomes clear that Ethan is the one more drawn to the lighter, brasher, and more irreverent side of their shared sensibility—the kind of off-the-rails crime comedies that hark back to their early period. If that wasn’t entirely obvious with Drive-Away Dolls, there’s no room for doubt after Honey Don’t!, his second B-movie thriller centered on lesbian women caught in tense, slightly absurd police situations. The film is apparently the second “episode” in a trilogy Ethan is developing with his co-writer (and wife) Tricia Cooke, so it remains to be seen what the third installment will bring.

The split has sharpened the contrast within the brothers. Joel, especially after his adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth, comes across as the more serious and austere of the two, while Ethan seems increasingly committed to over-the-top, pulp-inflected versions of popular thrillers. Honey Don’t! fits squarely into that mold: a tiny, retro-tinged, ’90s-style noir focused on the life and misadventures of a private detective played by Margaret Qualley, who balances razor-sharp investigative instincts with a very active sex life.

With more sex scenes per minute than about 90 percent of contemporary American cinema—there are over half a dozen, and the film doesn’t even reach 85 minutes—Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, who gets pulled into the story when she realizes that a would-be client has turned up dead, her car overturned on a highway near Bakersfield, the desert California town where the film is set. Marty (Charlie Day), the local cop on the case, investigates while also, like almost everyone else, trying to ask Honey out—only to be met, unfailingly, with her reply: “I like girls.” But there’s more: earlier, we’ve seen another sexy woman vandalize the corpse and steal a ring from it. What’s really going on here?

Honey is juggling three threads at once. First, her sister and her complicated brood of children, which includes a teenage girl (Talia Ryder) being abused by her boyfriend. Second, the investigation itself, which begins to lead her toward a bizarre local church run by a pastor (Chris Evans) who seems to spend most of his time sleeping with his parishioners and may be tied to a drug-trafficking operation. And third—last but hardly least—a relationship she starts with MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a local police officer with whom she shares a series of intense sexual encounters, including one in a bar that stands out as the film’s best scene, and with whom she seems, for once, interested in getting a little more emotionally involved.

Moving through these intersecting worlds, the film piles up several brutal crimes, many of them handled in an absurdist key, while gradually trying to adopt a slightly more serious tone as it goes along—particularly in relation to Honey and MG’s connection. That’s why the resolution of the brief case—treated rather lightly, it must be said, despite dealing with some genuinely dark material—ends up feeling somewhat underwhelming. In truth, the film never aims to be more than a light, niche-market diversion, the kind of throwback that recalls a time when popular entertainment, and thrillers in particular, were more openly sexual.

Coen doesn’t do much with that legacy beyond foregrounding it. Honey Don’t! has no real interest in interrogating questions of gender—despite the subject matter and the presence of sexual and religious abuse in the background—so much as using them as a mildly provocative backdrop for a comedy driven by acidic dialogue, knowing glances, and a consistently steamy tone. Compared to almost any film the brothers made together, it plays like a minor diversion. And even here, the cynicism that has always defined the Coens never fully disappears. There are no entirely happy endings in their world—and in that sense, at least, not much has changed after the “separation.”