“Honey Don’t!” is Director Ethan Coen (“Drive-Away Dolls,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo”) and Screenwriter Tricia Cooke’s (“Drive-Away Dolls”) latest foray into the world of dark comedies. Serving as the spiritual sequel to “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024), the pair’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy” continues to be strangely off-putting and almost camp. The film follows small town private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) as she attempts to solve a string of mysterious murders plaguing Bakersfield, California. Along the way, she finds an ally and lover in cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), while drawing the attention of the evangelist sex cult leader Reverend Drew (Chris Evans) and a hitwoman named Chère (Lera Abova), suggesting the string of murders may go deeper than she thinks. This exciting new release had audiences waiting with bated breaths for what seemed to be something truly new and inventive: a stylized, smarmy detective story with a compellingly laughable villain, a sapphic subplot and a retro feel. This film promised a lot, and it saddens me to say it could not deliver.
On the surface, “Honey Don’t!” is a beautiful film. The film opens with a stylized long credit roll, making use of their big-budget cast names by throwing them up onto various town landmarks. Taking time on the opening credits is an art so lost to time that I can really only recall “Deadpool” (2016) doing so in the modern age. Slowly immersing the audience into the world shows a care for style that a lot of films lack these days. Showing more care for stylistic consistency, “Honey Don’t!” has a consistently warm color pallette, leaning hard to its retro feel. The costuming further grounds the pseudo-retro feel of the film, with characters dressed in the attire of the 1960s to 1970s even as the film takes place post-COVID. The only hints to the actual time period are the sparing use of cell phones and a line from Billy Eichner’s character about COVID-19-related concerns. The point of this line is seemingly only to date the film. Considering “Honey Don’t!” was otherwise not heavy-handed with exposition—instead allowing the audience to experience the plot and most revelations with Honey—the addition was jarring but allowable.
The homey, small town costuming coupled with the warmth strikes a beautiful contrast to the unsettling nature of the film, leaving the audience stuck between comfort and oddity. Strangely enough, the warm color palette also makes the blood and guts in the extremely violent scenes pop even more, both from a color and tonal standpoint. The visual effects in these shots are masterfully done. Intense burns, gaping wounds and slashes are all done practically and the audience can tell in the best way possible. While “Honey Don’t!” is a let down in many ways, it succeeds in creating a cohesive and uneasily beautiful world.
I will admit that “Honey Don’t!” did nail one element of neo-noir: the femme fatale. The femme fatale is a noir stock character who, through villainous mystery, seduces men (and occasionally women) to achieve her vile and unpredictable whims. In the neo-noir genre, she may be deconstructed through a feminist lense, but some choose to keep the character as-is. The hitwoman Chère is the archetypal femme fatale, and she is everything. Chère’s nonchalance contrasts beautifully with the other dark comedy elements in the film. Her air of mystery is so strong that she remains unnamed until the final scene, in which she flirts with the main character Honey. Considering how heavily stylized this film is and how many genres it attempts to dip into, having a grounded noir genre staple is a great benefit to this movie.
The only element of the film that breaks this beautiful vision is the use of gratuitous sex scenes. Often, discussions of whether or not sex scenes are warranted circle back to the male gaze. To put a very complicated topic simply, the male gaze is a feminist theory term used to describe the way men tend to depict women as nothing more than sexual objects. In contrast to that, some internet feminists have proposed the idea of a female gaze—a more emotional, less sexual view of women. The existence of this gaze is hotly debated. I do not believe in it. I think it can be useful to point out where the oppressive male gaze influences a film, but I do not believe in the existence of the female gaze. A film being written by a woman—as this film is—does not mean it is feminist, it does not mean it exemplifies the female gaze. The point of the male gaze is not to point out that a man wrote it; the point of the male gaze is to show oppression. Reverend Drew runs a sex cult, so in those contexts, the sex scenes make sense. However, the cult, romantic and miscellaneous sex scenes really just seem like they are there to pad an already short runtime. That is all to say that this film is neither feminist nor a striking example of the male gaze; the sex scenes simply make no sense. The style of the film does lend itself to shock value, but the gratuitous sex scenes don’t add to the film in that sense either.
The greatest fault of this film is the run time. “Honey Don’t!” is a tight 90 minutes. It truly attempts to capture the spirit of a B-movie; you’re in, you’re out and you have a good time. “Honey Don’t!” desperately needs more than 90 minutes. The first half of the film takes its time to perfectly capture the energy of a detective film. It is a classic trope of detective fiction of the past: something is wrong, and gosh darn, our heroine will figure out what that is. The audience gets to experience the clues with the detective, or, in this case, the private investigator. Honey seems out of her depth, and so is the audience. That is fine, but a good detective or mystery film will have some means for the audience to solve the mystery alongside the investigator. Sadly, “Honey Don’t!” falls into an ever-present modern problem: the plot twist. In the end, it is revealed that MG is the serial killer. She monologues like a nemesis in a classic old-timey film, it should be extremely compelling. I did not care. Upon a second watch, there were no “A-Ha!” moments; I could not track any foreshadowing. There was no set up for this and there is nothing in MG’s characterization that suggests she is hiding something or has a sinister secret life. The ending just occurs without any of the middle to make it make sense.
Overall, “Honey Don’t!” is confused. Genres billed in it include neo-noir, dark comedy, detective, crime, mystery and thriller. As previously mentioned, there is also a romantic subplot. For a film that is marketed so clearly as what it is, the film doesn’t know what to focus on or for how long. As college students, we need to be wise about our time and our money. Maybe skip seeing “Honey Don’t!” in theaters this time around, but 90 minutes once it comes on streaming won’t kill you. If it does, you may end up one of Honey’s cold cases.