Margaret Qualley in Ethan Coen Whodunit

In Honey Don’t!, the latest film in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s intended lesbian B-movie trilogy, Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a tough but glamorous private investigator in Bakersfield, California. Honey is typically in the business of infidelity, taking cases involving suspicious spouses and their philandering partners. But at the start of Coen’s prankish film, which premiered at Cannes and will be released in theaters by Focus Features on Aug. 22, the sleuth finds herself drawn into a higher-stakes mystery. The death of a local woman leads Honey down a slippery path involving religious cults, megalomaniacal pastors and an unexpected romance. 

For the most part, Honey Don’t! lives in the same thematic universe as Coen’s first solo narrative venture Drive-Away Dolls, which the director also co-wrote with Cooke. In that film, Qualley played a lesbian Lothario, who, after a bad break-up with her police officer girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), journeys across the country with her best friend (an excellent Geraldine Viswanathan). But their interstate adventure is compromised when they realize their rental car contains goods critical to a nefarious scheme, and the women spend most of the leaden road movie trying to outrun a pair of goons. Secondary to the zany caper is a love story that, disappointingly, lacks real stakes.

Honey Don’t! is a better movie than Drive-Away Dolls thanks to an engaging whodunit plot, but it ultimately suffers from the same issues as its predecessor: The film feels like a series of gags with nowhere to go. 

In previous interviews, Coen and Cooke have described their joint narrative ventures as an opportunity to make films for an “underserved market.” The pair want to put queer characters at the center of the kinds of brash genre movies they admire, which is a refreshing goal, notably taken up by other filmmakers like Emma Seligman (Bottoms), Annapurna Sriram (F*cktoys) and Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding). But even the coarsest humor needs a narrative anchor, a story that keeps viewers meaningfully invested. Honey Don’t! begins with a little of that, but eventually squanders the viewer’s good will in a frustrating third act that inspires more exasperation than laughs.  

What does work in this film are the performances and some elements of its world-building. Qualley is much better suited for the role of a sardonic, hard-boiled detective click-clacking around town in her heels than she was for the uninhabited lesbian with a distracting Southern accent. Aubrey Plaza is also well-cast as her emotionally distant love interest, MG Falcone, a cop at the local precinct; and Chris Evans slips easily into the role of Drew Devlin, a lecherous religious cult leader.

There is also a gallery of strong supporting characters, including Josh Pafcheck and Gabby Beans, who bring real humor to their roles as Drew’s assistant Shuggie and Honey’s assistant Spider, respectively. And credit must go to Peggy Schnitzer, whose excellent costume design — from Honey’s well-tailored pants suits to Spider’s eye-catching blouses — reinforce and distinguish each character’s role in this small town’s surreal ecosystem. 

We meet Honey at the site of an awful car crash, where she joins Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), a homicide detective for the police department, in surveying the damage. The victim’s name is Mia and although the scene looks like an accident, Honey isn’t convinced. Instead of trying to support the private investigator, Marty just flirts with Honey. A recurring bit throughout the film, which quickly grows stale, is Marty’s refusal to accept that Honey is a lesbian. Against the backdrop of this investigation, Honey starts sleeping with MG (Plaza), another officer at the local precinct, and tries to help her teenage niece (Talia Ryder) leave an abusive relationship. 

Outside of Honey’s personal life, the details of a cultish world emerge. Drew, a reverend for a prosperity gospel type church, realizes that investigations into the car crash could lead authorities to the depth of his scheme.

Here’s where Honey Don’t! becomes shaky, revealing the limits of a film propelled only by antics. There are suggestions of a covert drug ring run by a French mafia group, whose interests are represented by a mysterious Frenchwoman (Lera Abova) who rides around Bakersfield on her Vespa. As more dead bodies pop up in Bakersfield, Honey starts to realize their connection to the strange church that preys on emotionally vulnerable people, especially young women. You want to know more about the scheme and how Drew’s church, which the arrogant pastor runs poorly, fits into all of it, but Coen and Cooke only elaborate insofar as it helps establish the next gag. 

A similarly compelling thread that doesn’t get enough air is the relationship between Honey and MG. The lesbians are an emotionally distant pair who’ve met their match in each other. There’s a mix of steamy and sweet sequences, but as with Jamie and Marian in Drive-Away Dolls, a sense of incompleteness nags at the romance, especially as it takes darker and more twisted turns.

Qualley and Plaza do their best to shade their characters, and Plaza, especially, makes a lot of a much thinner role. Both get some sharp one-liners and there are plot gestures that try to deepen our sense of each character. But ultimately, Honey Don’t! is the kind of film having so much fun with itself that it forgets to let audiences in on the joke.