Ethan Coen | Honey Don't! / 2025

who she is and where she’s at

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke (screenplay), Ethan Coen (director) Honey Don't! / 2025

 

Although most critics figured out rather quickly that the newest Ethan Coen film Honey Don’t is playing with the detective noir genre, and that the detective in this case not only purposely stands against type—instead of the cynical, fast-talking white hetero this film’s detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a tough, curvaceous, well-dressed lesbian—this detective striding her way in heels through her multiple investigations without being able to make even the easiest of connections. Besides, we already know that at least the first death, that of Mia Novotny (Kara Petersen)—a client of Honey’s who has missed her appointment by presumably crashing her car off a cliff—is connected with the local Bakersfield religious cult the Four-Way Temple since in the very first scene we watch another woman, this one also dressed in high heels as well as a tight-fitting dress of zebra skin, scramble down the hill and wrestle the ring off the dead woman’s finger.

     Although the critics basically praised the film’s actors, particularly Qualley and Chris Evans— the sleazy leader of the Four-Way Temple, the Reverend Drew Devlin—most of them were irritated by the film’s structure or the lack of it, The Hollywood Reporter describing the movie as a “series of gags with nowhere to go,” IndieWire arguing the work is “a mishmash of disparate parts,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody complaining that the film has no backstory. The New York Times reviewer Beatrice Loayza not only insisted that the events of the film “feel deliberately random,” but in the same sentence added a second major attack by the critics in general, that the jokes “feel lazy.” 

     But when I thought about these complaints in relation to the so-called classics of noir detective tales, I had to ask when did any such film structurally make sense or provide the viewer with a full backstory? When did any detective truly come up with a remarkably witty come-back? The goal is such works is to set the detective on the trail of a series of seemingly disconnected events that allows him, along the way, to fall in love with one or more of his clients while requiring the writer and director to desperately struggle to bring some coherence to the darkly scattered events of the tale. Most noir detectives—unlike the breed of puzzle-solvers such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple (the latter of whom was partnered in the Margaret Rutherford versions to her real life husband, Stringer Davis, but might as well have been queer the way the eccentric Rutherford performs her), Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, Columbo and numerous other rationalists—stumble their way through the movies such as the The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Chinatown, without often knowing even what it is they are looking for and seldom finding any logic in the end, as well as losing the gal in which they fell in love along the way. Sam Spade never finds the “real” falcon or even discovers if there was ever a real such statuette; and I dare anyone to explain to me the full plots and consequences of the other two films? Mightn’t we describe both as a series of seemingly “random events” or a “mishmash of disparate parts?” Humphrey Bogart purposely makes his every line appear as if he it is simply too difficult given the realities of his world to make a clever deduction, and Jake Gittes has learned from experience to doubt every word anyone, including himself, might ever speak. These men have been hurt too many times.

   In fact, Honey O’Donahue is quite certain about her world and her own role in it; it’s the rest of her decayed and rotten Bakersfield world that is a confused mess.

     As she sasses back to homicide detective Marty Metakawitch’s (Charlie Day) awkward flirtations, perhaps for the 50th time he’s tried to get her on a date: “I like girls.” Yet the dim-witted dunce is doomed to the same behavior the next time the two encounter one another.

    Even before she’s crossed the doorstep of Mia’s mother’s house to ask some questions about her daughter, her current husband or boyfriend insists she doesn’t know anything, although Honey not only quickly discovers through a look around the place that she was a member of the Four-Way Temple cult but reveals a leather sex halter wrapped up inside her white church-going robe, cluing her and the film’s viewers that Revered Devlin requires his female devotees to not only “act” but passively engage with his sexual aggressions. He spends most of the film in bed with one or two of his female congregants explaining to them, as he fucks, how to further find ways to excite him.

  Honey knows his kind too well, and counters his drooling sexual snarl of an attempt to arrange a meetup with a whip-snap of wit. When Devlin queries her, “Do you drink?” she answers, “Heavily, it’s a point of pride.” “Should you and I discuss this over a drink?” “Tuesdays I dry out.” Leaning over his desk, he whispers, “Today’s Wednesday,” she responding quite emphatically, “Today is Tuesday.” Later, he describes her as “fascinating,” she besting him with a quick reply, “And you haven’t even seen the riddle tattooed on ass.”

    When Honey’s older sister Heidi demands that the oldest of her six children, Corinne (Talia Ryder), about to go out on a date, be home by midnight, the daughter, already on her boyfriend’s motorcycle answers, “I won’t be home tonight,” visiting her aunt the next day afraid to go home covered, as she is, with the black and blue marks of where that date has brutally hit her.

     Honey not only later takes things in hand by beating up the young male punk who has hurt her niece, but when she’s finished with him and done deconstructing his rifle, she slaps a sticker proclaiming “I have a vagina and I vote” over his vehicle’s MAGA decal.

     Even a lowly female police worker MG Falcone’s (Aubrey Plaza) subservient actions of handing over the address of Mia’s mother, doesn’t escape Honey’s ever-active gaydar; she arranges for the woman to meet her at a bar wherein they publicly engage in a deep dangle of one another’s crotch before returning home to fuck.

     When an unhappy gay man comes to her in the hopes that she will trail his husband to see if he’s cheating on him, Honey explains that 1.) he already knows he’s cheating if it’s come this far; 2.) the best thing he can do is talk it out with his lover; or 3.) divorce the brute.

      In short, even if she becomes a bit distracted in finding Mia’s killer, Honey knows who she is and what her world is all about.

     It is that world that goes about mysteriously meeting up in bar where the gay man’s boyfriend awaits to meet up with a man for a drug deal, and who when approached by a boy, Hector, delivering up the drugs from the Four-Way Temple demanding he first pay his back bill, becomes infuriated that his drug-deal may go sour. When he bends down to fellate Hector in exchange the drugs, the boy freaks, knocks the man out, and runs him over in his car.

   It is that world in the form of the religious cult that sends out the church thug Shuggie (Josh Pafchek) to quiet Hector, mistakenly shooting the boy’s agèd grandmother, before finally encountering the boy, who he also shoots, but not before the surviving Hector kills him. Hector goes on to attempt to murder Rev. Devlin in his bed, but is shot and killed by that holy ambassador of God.

    It is that insane patriarchy in the form of Honey’s abusive father (Kale Browne) who, in returning to beg Honey and her sister Heidi’s forgiveness scares off Corinne, who runs off in fear into the hands of the cult.

    And it is the local police woman Falcone, also a member of the cult, who through the abuse of her military father, her school peers, and the church, has become psychotic, having murdered several women previously including Mia (whose body she stuffed into the car before sending it over the cliff), has kidnapped Honey’s niece Corinne, and finally, confronted by the detective, is really to add Honey to her list of missing and dead women.

     Honey survives, returning to the streets and a summary by Homicide detective Marty, of all that has occurred, as well as another flirtations jibe, ending with Honey’s reminder of her sexual lust.

    Honey is back on the streets just in time to reencounter the French woman Chère (Leera Abova), who represents the money behind all the Four-Way Temple’s actions, and now on her scooter, after having sex with Devlin and finishing up with a round of bullets in his gut, is about to catch a plane out of town.

     Once more Honey’s gaydar kicks in, as she asks what time is the stranger’s flight. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even if it’s only another chance event in a world of random murders and mayhem.

      Honey Don’t is the second film of Coen’s and his wife Tricia Cooke’s planned trilogy of grade-B lesbian films, the first being the 2004 movie Drive-Away Dolls. Although I don’t plan to extend this series of queer cinema discussions beyond 2025, I will obviously have to find a way to sneak in the third of this clever comedic series.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).