Honey Don't! Review: Margaret Qualley in a Queer Noir

Margaret Qualley Bogarts Her Way Through the Delightful Honey Don’t!

It’s best not to think of Honey Don’t! as a whodunit, just as it would have been equally unwise to think of the same filmmakers’ Drive Away Dolls as a movie about a car chase. Though largely different in tone, both movies are more about the signposts than the road in front of them. They’re canted-angle genre exercises filled with caricatures, yet somehow focused intently on their characters, albeit in a sidelong sort of way.

The film is the second in a loosely planned and loosely executed trilogy from the husband-and-wife duo of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. Their collaborations so far take familiar B-picture genres, the types of stories Coen might have once cooked up with his sibling Joel, and hand them over to queer women characters. Honey Don’t! follows private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) poking around a series of murders, and possibly falling in love, in and around sunbaked, seemingly shadeless Bakersfield, California. Like a lot of Coen movies, it’s not exactly an outright spoof, but it takes place in its own little stylized pocket universe.

Unlike a lot of Coen movies, Honey Don’t! doesn’t quite come together as a mystery. Or rather, it’s only able to come together because it commits to a haphazard approach – though Honey’s physical approach to and from crime scenes, her office, and anywhere else, is impeccably styled, whether in a red polka-dot dress or a fine set of high-waisted slacks. MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop at the station she pops into for intel, admires her “clip-clop heels.” Marty (Charlie Day), another cop at the same station, can’t stop asking for her number. Honey is upfront about whose advances she prefers.

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As Coen and Cooke have put it in interviews, Qualley is playing the Humphrey Bogart role here, though Bogart generally faced fewer opportunities to quietly swallow his disgust and keep nominally polite when questioning a particularly condescending suspect. One of the best things about the film is how it allows Qualley to toy with the conventions of the hardboiled detective, sometimes tweaking them for a young lesbian woman, sometimes leaving them be, and sometimes tweaking them by leaving them be, if that makes sense.

Granted, this might work even better in a movie with a tightly coiled mystery. The traditional noir method would be to present Honey with a seemingly straightforward case and have her investigation lead down a variety of seemingly disparate paths and alleyways that converge at the end. Instead, as Honey investigates the death of a not-quite client with seeming ties to the Reverent Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), the movie sometimes drifts from her point of view, for scenes showing bits and pieces of what’s going on with Devlin and his scammy church. He preaches catchphrased nonsense that needs only slight warping to take the form of a come-on, yet believes in himself with an appropriately religious fervor. He’s also entangled with an unspecified group of French criminals.

This break from Honey makes sense, insofar as Evans is very funny as Devlin, and, moreover, to ask a Coen sibling to ignore dunderheaded criminal schemes gone awry is to deny their very essence. But it also means that Honey’s clues and leads favor Coen-style accidents of fate, involving the tangential screw-ups of Devlin’s crew, information supplied by MG and Marty, and a bit of family backstory from Honey. Not much real detective work, in other words. Coen and Cooke disguise their red herrings by composing a mystery that, at times, feels like wading through an entire school of red herrings, set loose to disguise a certain obviousness.

Yet on a scene-by-scene basis, Honey Don’t! is involving and entertaining, sometimes wildly so. Drive Away Dolls designated Ethan as the anything-for-a-laugh Coen – at a post-screening Q&A, he admitted that no gag was too dumb for his tastes, a preference not necessarily shared by Cooke – which makes the more precise compositions, moodier banter, and gruesome slapstick of Honey Don’t! seem relatively restrained. That’s especially true for Qualley herself, who embraced cartoon loquaciousness as the co-lead of Dolls, and here dries out for a more laconic, graphically striking approach; cinematographer Ari Wegner’s camera loves her more than ever. Whenever Honey pauses for softer human interaction – romping in bed with MG, visiting her sister (Kristen Connolly) and her innumerable children, confronting her past late in the picture – Qualley’s little modulations of how much of her flinty guard to let down provide the requisite mystery lacking from the film’s actual plotting.

It will be admittedly difficult for some viewers to re-adjust their Coen-related expectations again for Honey Don’t!, which is less rat-a-tat than fans of The Hudsucker Proxy or Miller’s Crossing might hope, as well as less unexpectedly tender than Dolls (though, if anything, even more explicit in its sexiness). Yet divorced, or at least amicably separated, from those expectations, the new picture makes for a fine night out, lightly subversive as it mixes character moments with absurdities. Like its namesake, the movie clip-clops around with confidence.

Director: Ethan Coen
Writers: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day
Release Date: August 22, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

Margaret Qualley Bogarts Her Way Through the Delightful Honey Don’t!