Honey Don’t!, a new dark comedy by Ethan Coen (2025)

Planet Claire
Sep 28
5 min read

Updated: Oct 2

Honey Don’t!

Genre: Dark comedy

Duration: 1h 29’

Directed by: Ethan Coen

Screenplay by: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke

Cinematography by: Ari Wegner

Ethan Coen’s latest film is beautiful and highly entertaining. Honey Don’t! is a dark comedy, a pulp detective story, a queer noir.

I enjoyed it a lot.

Ethan Coen temporarily steps away from working with his brother Joel to co-create, alongside his wife Tricia Cooke, the brilliant editor behind most of the Coen Brothers’ films, Honey Don’t!, the second chapter of his “lesbian B-movie” trilogy. The project playfully satirises the conventions of 1970s and 1980s lesbian cinema, where erotic female scenes were often inserted mid-action simply for display. Coen and Cooke play with the staging of eroticism. This film is a modern, “gritty,” sexy crime story that toys with conventions to make them waver.

The "Lesbian B-Movies" trilogy

The first film in the trilogy, created by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, is Drive-Away Dolls (2024), a fast-paced adventure of two girls (Margaret Qualley also stars here), who, while on the road, encounter a gang of inept criminals, a corrupt politician, and a suitcase full of dildos.

The third film in the trilogy is still in early development and is titled Go, Beavers!. It will be a horror movie about a university lesbian kayaking team reuniting on a river trip, with members starting to die one by one. The film will mix horror elements with a coming-of-age narrative, and it is inspired by Nicholas Roeg’s Australian film Walkabout (the director of the cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976, starring David Bowie).

I suspect my favourite in the trilogy will be the second film, precisely because I adore dark-comedy detective stories enriched with sarcastic black humour.

The film has a wonderful pace, mystery, and the moral secrets and tensions typical of noir, augmented with a contemporary queer twist.

Set in Bakersfield, a small Californian town surrounded by desert, it was mostly filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It is beautifully shot by Ari Wegner, the Australian cinematographer I admired for her work on Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021). The suburban buildings, dusty and grimy environments, contrasting light, oil fields, desaturated colours, and characters, all are eloquent under her gaze. Ari Wegner’s cinematography captivates from the opening titles, which are stylishly integrated into the landscape, inscribed vintage-style on the buildings.

Ethan Coen also satirises the noir genre: bodies abound in Honey Don’t!, and the film is brimming with pulp elements. The film also heavily leans into dark humour, with dialogue and situations bordering on parody.

The plot is gripping, the mystery classic (suspicious deaths, a missing girl), suspense is well-measured, digressions are amusing, and all characters are spot-on.

Coen also pokes fun at marginalised figures in American society, thus satirising society itself. Ethan Coen’s taste for the eccentric is always evident, portraying a series of quirky individuals, even through caricatured dialogue, whom you feel, and indeed know, truly exist in the USA, and are in fact quite common.

Supporting Roles

These perfectly crafted minor characters give us a glimpse of a world orbiting around Honey, populated by eccentric, often foolish or morally ambiguous people, each peculiar and absurd in their own way.

Let’s start, in reverse, with them—the supporting characters.

Some examples include: Shuggie, the reverend’s all-purpose criminal, played by Josh Pafchek; Gary, the piano bar bartender, played by Don Swayze (brother of the more famous Patrick Swayze); Chère, the mysterious French criminal on a Vespa, played by Lera Abova; Honey’s sister Heidi O’Donahue, played by Kristen Connolly; Honey’s assistant Spider, played by Gabby Beans; young Mexican Hector, played by Jacnier; Honey’s elderly father (“You are already dead, didn’t they tell you?”), played by Kale Browne; and Mr Siegfried, a client of the private investigation agency, played by Billy Eichner.

Margaret Qualley

The lead is Honey O’Donahue, portrayed by the elegant and charismatic Margaret Qualley, recently admired in the horror film The Substance by Coralie Fargeat (2024). Qualley comes from an artistic family: her mother is actress Andie MacDowell, her father the model Paul Qualley.

Honey drives the wide Californian roads in her metallic blue Chevrolet convertible. In the film, she is a private detective investigating the suspicious death of a woman, Mia Novotny, hastily dismissed as a traffic accident. Her investigation uncovers the involvement of a corrupt evangelical church led by the shady Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), a preacher who mixes religion, sex with his followers, and methamphetamine trafficking.

Honey is not a solitary heroine: she has a sister with a brood of children, a rebellious teenage niece, Corinne (Talia Ryder), and a police detective lover, MG (Mary Grace, as her parrot will reveal) Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) (“Honey, right? Love those click-clacking heels.”)

Male Characters

In Honey Don’t! the male characters are weak, inept, unintelligent, or creepy. There is Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), a detective police officer, embarrassing in his constant attempts to woo Honey, always saying: “Honey O’Donohue! To what do we owe the honour?” His caricatured clumsiness represents the clueless man who cannot come to terms with rejection by a beautiful woman. Reverend Devlin (Chris Evans) is a narcissist embodying the corruption of power. These false masculinities reflect weaknesses, uncontrolled impulses, and shaky clichés.

The ending is an elegant stylistic play.

The film, after the prologue depicting the traffic accident, begins with the song We Gotta Get Out of This Place by The Animals (1965), here in Brittany Howard’s version, very similar to the original. It’s a prelude to a beautifully curated soundtrack, accompanying the entire film brilliantly, setting its tone. Worth listening to independently. The original music by composer Carter Burwell, a Coen Brothers regular, who has scored nearly all their films, together with unreleased tracks and selected existing songs, creates a cohesive, ironic, and vibrant sound universe.

Here are the track titles from the Honey Don’t! soundtrack album:

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Animals, 1965), nella versione di Brittany Howard

Rough Love – Carter Burwell

ODDWADD – Lace Manhattan (Margaret Qualley)

Tommy's Ballad - Fynn

Heidi Ho – Carter Burwell

Did You See Heaven – Carter Burwell

Little Black Star – Lace Manhattan

Those Click-Clacking Heels – Carter Burwell

The Wrong Penis Move – Carter Burwell

Honey Don’t! (Cast Recording) – Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Talia Ryder

You Will Not – Carter Burwell