Margaret Qualley
Honey O'Donahue
Honey Don't!
“She only has two desires, and one of them is justice.”
2025
1h 29m
Director: Ethan Coen
Overview
Honey O'Donahue, a small-town private investigator, delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
3 min readThe Grime and the Glamour of Bakersfield
I’m beginning to suspect Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke are mostly interested in seeing whether the rest of us can keep pace. Their so-called "lesbian B-movie trilogy" started last year with Drive-Away Dolls, which felt like a sugar-rushed swerve. Now Honey Don't's read is that arrives and trades highway chaos for a sun-blasted, vaguely desolate Bakersfield neo-noir.
It’s an odd movie, no question. I’m still unconvinced it hangs together as a mystery in the usual sense, but that also seems beside the point.
The story, if that word even quite fits, is all hardboiled fragments, detours, and false leads. Margaret Qualley plays Honey O'Donahue, a local private eye who still favors a Rolodex and carries quarters for pay phones. After a young woman is found dead in an overturned car in Antelope Canyon, Honey starts tugging at clues that lead to the Four-Way Temple, a church that also happens to function as a drug-trafficking operation.
Coen and Cooke push hard on their Bogart and Altman influences, sketching a version of California that has nothing to do with glamour and everything to do with cheap motels and strip-mall fatigue. The film looks right. The mood is there.
Audience Opinions
Audience 5.3/10
"A scattershot queer neo-noir whose stylish look and charismatic lead cannot overcome a muddled story and clumsy writing."
Margaret Qualley’s performance and the queer detective premise generate most of the enjoyment, with some appreciating the offbeat humor, the sapphic couple, and the retro crime-movie vibe. Far more common are complaints that the plot feels aimless and incoherent, side characters are thin or irritating, the tone lurches between dark comedy and crime thriller, and sexual content is excessive without emotional payoff, latestnetflix.com contends, leaving the film feeling shallow and frustrating rather than clever or exciting.
What viewers praise
- Compelling lead performance Margaret Qualley is widely praised as magnetic and charismatic, often cited as the only reason the film remains watchable.
- Queer detective premise The focus on a lesbian private investigator and a sapphic relationship is welcomed, especially the avoidance of a conventional love triangle.
- Distinctive visual style The neo-noir look and small-town desert decay atmosphere stand out, giving the film a recognizable retro crime-movie flavor.
Common complaints
- Messy unfocused plot The story is often described as a narrative waste of time, with scenes that feel randomly stitched together and major threads that go nowhere.
- Shallow thin characters Supporting roles, including key figures played by Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans, are criticized as underwritten, cartoonish, or simply annoying.
- Awkward tone and pacing The film struggles to balance dark comedy, sleaze, and mystery, creating jarring shifts in tone and a feeling that the movie never really clicks.
- Flat often cringey dialogue Lines are frequently called repetitive, unfunny, or painful, lacking the sharpness and rhythm associated with the director’s best work.
- Gratuitous sexual content Both lesbian and heterosexual sex scenes are often viewed as excessive or pointless, adding provocation without deepening character or story.
Recommended for
Margaret Qualley devotees Queer neo-noir curiosity seekers Offbeat crime comedy collectors Ethan Coen solo-project completists
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsChris Evans skipped Cannes for his mother's birthday. The ovation went on without him
Midnight at Cannes, 24 May 2025. Honey Don't! started late, past 12:30 a.m., and still got a standing ovation Deadline timed at six and a half minutes. Tricia Cooke, who wrote the film with her husband Ethan Coen, yelled that there should be more queer cinema all the time. Margaret Qualley's husband Jack Antonoff was in the room, clapping louder. Aubrey Plaza walked a red carpet for the first time after her husband Jeff Baena died in January. Chris Evans was not there. CinemaBlend reported he posted that it was his mother's 70th birthday, and that some things you cannot miss. latestnetflix.com's take is that Captain America picking his mom over a Palais midnight slot is the most decent thing anyone did that week.
Evans plays Reverend Drew Devlin, a Four-Way Temple preacher who is either sermonizing or in bed. Coen told Collider the pitch was simply to read the script, and that Evans "did it with relish." Qualley is Honey O'Donahue, a Bakersfield private eye in red heels, the second time Coen and Cooke have built a lesbian pulp film around her after Drive-Away Dolls. They have called the three scripts a lesbian B-movie trilogy. The third title they have floated is Go Beavers. Wikipedia notes the couple spent twenty years writing this stack. Variety reported Qualley telling i-D she had to dial back her "natural Scooby-Doo" instincts to play someone smoother. 
A six-minute clap, then a $7.4 million thud. Focus Features opened the film in the United States on 22 August 2025. Rotten Tomatoes landed at 45 percent. The Numbers put the worldwide take at about $7.4 million against a $20 million budget logged on TMDB. What's on Netflix then confirmed a US streaming date of 3 February 2026, after a Peacock window, under Universal's new licensing path onto Netflix. A Cannes midnight movie with a Marvel star as a sex-cult pastor still needed the streamer to find a crowd.
Coen told Reuters he wanted the violence to be "fun, not just some like weird sadistic thing," chasing the inventiveness of Sam Raimi's early work. He also said he picked Bakersfield to capture a non-glamorous California. The Hollywood Reporter liked the performances and still called the movie a series of gags with nowhere to go. That is a polite way of saying the Palais will clap for anything at midnight, and Friday night in Des Moines will not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzr6pHIZAI0
The official Focus Features trailer is the click-clacking heels and Evans filling a need. Netflix now has the film. Coen and Cooke still owe a third B-movie. Evans already proved he will skip a festival for his mother. The rest of the trilogy will have to live with that energy.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.