'Honey Don't!' Review: A Baffling and Incoherent Misfire From Ethan Coen
- Dan Bremner
- 1 minute ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - September 12, 2025
The second entry in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s planned “Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy,” Honey Don’t! follows last year’s Drive Away Dolls. While Drive Away Dolls was undeniably slight, it at least had a goofy energy, a breezy runtime, and enough laughs to feel like a fun diversion. This follow-up, however, is a completely different story. With the exception of a charismatic Margaret Qualley and an against-type Chris Evans clearly relishing his role as a sleazy preacher, this film is a cheap, clumsy, and lifeless mess that feels like a pile of mismatched ideas stitched together into a film that amounts to nothing.
What is Honey Don't about?
At its core, the story follows private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), who finds herself pulled into a string of mysterious deaths in a small Midwestern town. The deeper she digs, the more the evidence points toward a local church and its enigmatic preacher (Chris Evans), who may be covering up something sinister. On paper, that sounds like a juicy neo-noir setup, a PI, a corrupt church, and a trail of bodies, but in execution, the narrative never develops beyond its surface-level premise.
The most glaring issue here is the script. Coen and Cooke’s screenplay doesn’t so much tell a story as it lurches from one scene to the next, with no real sense of purpose or payoff. What could have been a sharp, pulpy noir about corruption and religious hypocrisy instead plays like a collection of discarded notes and half-baked ideas strung together. The plot is so messy and undercooked that it’s hard to even describe, a series of odd encounters, tangents, and setups that never build toward a satisfying arc or climax. Instead, it feels like a random shuffle of scenes designed to gesture vaguely at noir tropes without ever embracing them.
That lack of structure makes the film painfully unengaging. There’s no real momentum, no clear central conflict, and certainly no reason to care about where the story is heading. What’s worse is that for a film marketed as a “dark comedy,” Honey Don’t! is shockingly short on laughs. The humor is either too flat or too arch, with jokes that land awkwardly or moments that seem intended as absurd but come off more like dead air. Coen has always excelled at balancing the sinister and the silly, but here it feels like he’s going through the motions, with large stretches that feel muted, unfunny, and tonally adrift.
Direction Issues: Ethan Coen’s Most Lifeless Effort
Directorially, this is one of the most uninspired efforts I’ve seen from either Coen brother. Where the best of their work has striking visual style, rhythmic editing, and sharp framing, Honey Don’t! is startlingly lifeless. Scenes play out in a flat, arbitrary manner, with little thought to pacing or composition. At just 89 minutes, the film somehow manages to feel overlong, dragging itself through scenes that lack urgency or payoff. Even moments of graphic violence (something the Coens usually stage with shocking weight) here feel bizarrely flimsy and weightless, as though Coen himself didn’t really care about the outcome, coming off as amateur in the execution.
Characterization is another area where the film falls completely flat. Outside of Honey herself, most of the characters feel like empty stereotypes: the crooked cops, the shady church figures, the small-town weirdos. None of them are given depth or motivation, and the script doesn’t even attempt to flesh them out beyond their archetypes. This makes it nearly impossible to feel invested in the narrative or care about what happens to anyone. Thematically, the film gestures toward ideas about organized religion, corruption, and queer identity, but it doesn’t explore any of them in a meaningful way, leaving the film feeling shallow and unfinished.
That said, Margaret Qualley is the saving grace here. As Honey, she brings charm, wit, and physical presence to a role that desperately needs her energy. She plays Honey as both sardonic and earnest, which gives the character a spark of life even when the material lets her down. Aubrey Plaza, too, gets some fun moments with her trademark deadpan delivery, and the chemistry between the two actresses is one of the film’s few highlights. Chris Evans, playing against type as a slimy preacher, is clearly having fun, even if the role itself is underwritten. Without these three performers, the film would have been bordering on unwatchable.
Visually, though, it’s another disappointment. For a supposed noir, the lighting choices are distractingly poor. Scenes are often flatly lit, with no real atmosphere or mood, giving the film a cheap, “streaming original” look. The cinematography has no grit or texture, instead relying on overly stylized but inconsistent color palettes that fail to evoke the genre’s shadowy tension. Combined with some clunky editing and arbitrary staging, the film often feels visually incoherent. It never achieves the immersive mood it’s striving for, instead looking like something hastily thrown together on a mid-budget streaming schedule, not a film from someone partly responsible for some of the greatest films of the past 4 decades.
Final Verdict: A Misfire in the “Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy”
Honey Don’t! is just a big nothing. A messy, unpolished, frustratingly empty film that squanders its cast, its premise, and its potential. While some Coen films have revealed themselves on rewatch as hidden gems I initially didn’t “get,” I highly doubt that’s the case here. This feels less like a misunderstood oddity and more like a half-hearted experiment that never should have made it past the drafting stage. With one more entry still to come in the so-called “Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy,” I can only hope it finds some of the spark that this one completely lacks, because Honey Don’t! is a dead-on-arrival misfire.
'Honey Don't!' is out now in UK cinemas.
Want more film reviews? Check out more content on our website Film Focus Online!
