With Honey Don’t, now available on demand, the duo Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke reprise with an offbeat film headlined by a private detective played by Margaret Qualley, who is as queer as she is nosy.
After having already teamed up for Drive-Away Dolls in 2023, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke – a couple in real life – reprise the collaboration with Honey Don’t, the second installment of the “trilogy of lesbian B-movie films” they intend to produce, now available on VOD. In the previous film, Margaret Qualley (The Substance) played a young lesbian on the run who found herself in a completely bonkers road trip. Here, a total change of role as she lends her features to a taciturn private detective—but rest assured, she still loves women.
In a mid-sized town in Southern California, Honey O’Donahue runs her own business where she tries to resolve cases the police cannot crack. For instance, a string of suspicious deaths seems to lead to a church run by an atypical priest… who has all the markings of a cult leader. When her teenage niece disappears, the investigation takes on a more personal turn. And it is aided by the mysterious MG, her regular hookup who works in the police, that she attempts to unravel the case.
Unpretentious
In the wake of Drive-Away Dolls – which its creators stubbornly insist on calling by its original title Drive-Away Dykes – this new film from the Coen-Cooke duo refuses to take itself too seriously. Cruel without being in bad taste, Honey Don’t manages to be as entertaining as its elder. The plot can prove somewhat confusing, loaded with odd detours, to the point where you never quite know in which direction the writers will lead us. Yet the codes of noir crime are respected, their primary aim being to pay homage to iconic genre authors such as Jim Thompson or James M. Cain.
It is evident that Margaret Qualley is having fun in this new role and her on-screen dynamic with Aubrey Plaza, a lesbian icon since Happiest Season and Agatha All Along, works. “It’s just an action movie carried by a woman who plays a role traditionally masculine”, summarizes simply Tricia Cooke, who has again drawn on her experience as a queer woman to nourish the character. To her husband Ethan Coen, he adds: “It’s a film without pretensions of intellect and we’re proud of it. It’s really trashy in a way that pleases us.” In any case, a feature that manages to put Chris Evans in a jockstrap cannot be fundamentally bad.
