Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza Are Electric in the Otherwise Iffy 'Honey Don't'

As the Coen Brothers continue to work apart, Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke seem to be laser-focused on trying to find the perfect blend of queer, noir, and humor. There’s a very clear path from last year’s Drive-Away Dolls to Honey Don’t!, both of which were directed by Coen and co-written with Cooke. Here, a bit of the slapstick has been traded in for some extra pulp, and while their recipe still isn’t fully baked, it’s a move in the right direction.

After opening with a nicely shot scene of a mysterious woman stealing something from a fresh corpse, Honey Don’t! transitions into absolutely perfect, mood-setting opening credits. It’s a high that, for me, the film never quite gets back to, although it gets close a few times. While there are a lot of moving pieces to the film, true to its noirish bones, the throughline is detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley). She turns out to have a “not my client” interest in the corpse, which leads her on a circuitous course to eventually learning why the woman in the beginning wound up dead.

Along the way, Honey’s journey involves another client (Billy Eichner, in a small and very non-yelly role), her sister (Kristen Connolly), one of the sister’s like seven or eight kids (she’s got a lot a lot), and a dumb police detective (Charlie Day*). Each character is well written enough, and every performance is reliable, but none of them are meant to stand on their own. They’re there to help support Honey because this is really a detective story, and it’s her story. Which is great, because Qualley’s Honey is a wryer, less outwardly weird performance than we’ve seen from Qualley in a bit, and she wears it well. While this film was ultimately hit-or-miss for me, I would absolutely come back for more adventures of the detective with her own HNYDNT custom license plate.

*This role is a fun one for Day because his detective is just as clueless as the best Day characters, but not as completely buffoonish.

Speaking of wry and weird, and as good as Qualley is, the standout performance is actually Aubrey Plaza. Although the reason this performance works is that her MG Falcone is not actually wry or weird. What Falcone is, though, is dark, wise, sexy, and maybe a little dangerous. She’s a cop who meets Honey professionally before their relationship quickly escalates to the personal. And here are the film’s best moments, taking both of their strong performances and combining them - Plaza and Qualley are electric together, and I’m not referring to their actual sex scenes which … well, the characters certainly seem to be having a very good time.* I would watch these two characters just sit and talk with each other for hours, a bent sort of Before trilogy. It’s that kind of electric.

*And kudos to the film for using this as a moment to shine a light on the proper hygienic after-care of one’s sex toys.

Meanwhile, the other side of the film revolves around the presumed big bad, Chris Evans’ Reverend Drew Devlin (say that five times fast!*). His Reverend is the kind who sermonizes with absolutely stupid themes like “don’t be weak like macaroni.” He’s also the kind of heavily written character who has sex with prostitutes while speaking in preposterously stylized dialogue like “the point is to see your bosom jousting while we fellowship.” And of course he also runs the town’s drug trade. If it sounds like it’s a bit much, it is. Evans’ performance is a little shaggy around the edges, but he holds it together well enough, although his best scene is, unsurprisingly, when he shares space with Qualley.

*In my notes, I shorthanded this as Revans, which may actually be my favorite thing about the character.

In an earlier full-fledged Coen Brothers movie, Revans would fit right in. Here, there’s a note that’s just off and it’s hard to say if that’s Coen and Cooke still finding their own footing together, or what. But the film as a whole definitely feels like a continuation of the dialogue they started in Drive-Away Dolls, where they’re trying to find their own way without Ethan’s older bro Joel. And given that this is the supposed second in their so-called lesbian B-movie trilogy, I’m willing to stay on this journey with them … If the next movie could have a less terrible ending, though, that’d be great.