HONEY DON'T! - Mark Reviews Movies

Honey Don't!, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2025

Casting's important, because Honey Don't! would almost certainly be worse without Margaret Qualley in the role of the eponymous private investigator. As written by director Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, the character of Honey O'Donahue is nothing special—just an old-fashioned detective, complete with the methods and the lingo, working in a modern-day world that also, to the movie's extra detriment, feels a bit of a bygone era. Qualley, though, sells this character in a way that almost makes us think there might be something else going on beneath that obvious surface.

There isn't, to be clear, because this is a movie entirely about the superficial. The most unique aspect of Honey, for example, might be that, while she's the stereotypical hard-nosed and hard-drinking and skirt-chasing private eye that has filled many a screen and the pulpy pages of countless mystery novels, she is a woman. That's the gimmick and, well, about as far as Coen and Cooke take any sort of subversive or distinct interpretation of this archetypical character.

She is kind of fun to watch, at least, as Honey drives around Bakersfield, California, in a convertible with the top down, walks into a room with a look that lets us know she's several steps ahead of anyone else in there, and speaks as if she was raised on a diet of detective media that ended in the 1970s. In theory, she's an anachronism, although the world surrounding her appears to be as stuck in the past as Honey is. There are mentions of cellphones, for example, but everyone here behaves as if no one actually owns one. Honey apparently has one, but it's more interesting to note that she keeps all her important phone numbers on index cards in a rolling organizer.

Coen, making his second solo narrative movie, is usually more specific and perceptive than these little inconsistencies suggest. A decent setup, for example, would be that Honey is an old-timer in every imaginable way, navigating a world of the internet and having a near-infinite fount of knowledge in one's pocket. Instead, the cops here, represented by police detective Marty (Charlie Day) and uniformed cop MG (Aubrey Plaza), don't seem to have access to much by way of modern technology or, for that matter, a clue as to how they're supposed to do their job. Honey being smarter and more resourceful than this lot doesn't make her special in any way. It just makes her basically competent.

The plot of the movie is barely that, by the way. It starts with a dead body in an overturned car. The cops write it off as an accident, but Honey received a call from the victim the day before she died. The woman was scared of something or someone and wanted to hire Honey, and now, she's dead. There must be some kind of connection to those two events.

Coen and Cooke appear to give us an answer from the very start—even before their private detective is introduced. It's a local church, run by a lecherous minister named Drew (Chris Evans) and that is caught up in the illegal drug trade in town. In addition to his sexual exploits (not quite as ambitious, from what we see, as the church's name, the Four-Ways Temple, but only by one), Drew is indirectly or directly responsible for several deaths and/or killings here. Surely, the dead woman's membership in the church has something to do with her untimely demise.

This setup could also be intriguing, as Drew and cohorts dig themselves deeper into a hole, while Honey meticulously investigates her way closer and closer to the pit's edge. Instead, Drew and the church's dealings, also involving a visiting French woman (played by Lera Abova) who somehow—a modifier that becomes even more vital once the solution presents itself—knows exactly where to find the car crash, feel like a separate plot entirely. Some of it's amusing and wickedly cruel, especially a scene in which Drew's right-hand Australian Shuggie (Josh Pafchek) goes to clean up the loose ends of another church-related killing, but none of these characters has anything on Honey in terms of personality.

Meanwhile, Honey does the work and starts having an affair with MG, who seems a likely fit for the detective—being tough and cynical herself. The movie lets their relationship be sexy, which isn't nothing, the two to hint that there is a deeper bond than sex between them. Once Honey suspects that the church might have something to do with a mystery of a more personal sort for the private investigator (This is either a very small town or a very big church, but either way, the coincidences feel incredibly convenient), the script hurries to clear up all its loose ends.

Why, then, does it feel as if so many of those ends are left dangling by the end? Part of it surely is how unsatisfactory the answer to the mystery is. Most of it, though, is that Honey Don't! only provides the broad outlines of its characters and a plot. Honey possesses just enough potential to deserve more and better than that.

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