Starting with 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, director/co-writer Ethan Coen with co-writer Tricia Cooke began what we now know is a trilogy of lesbian B-movies, a triptych of sorts, that include Honey Don’t! (2025) and the upcoming (and not-yet-dated) Go, Beavers!. These films, each starring Margaret Qualley (The Substance; Kinds of Kindness), walk the line between darkness and light as its central character(s) explore the complexities of love. But where Dolls centered two mismatched close friends going on a road trip and accidentally stumbling their way into a conspiracy, Honey is far more straight-forward as a darkly comic brightly-shot neo-noir. Being straight-forward compared to Dolls doesn’t make it simpler, just that there’re fewer threads to follow, fewer knots to untangle, and a great deal more red herrings. Now out on home video without a single stitch of supplemental materials, fans curious about Coen and Cookie’s latest tale can investigate it freely — just don’t expect anything more than the presentation itself.
Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue in HONEY DON’T!. Photo courtesy of Focus Features/Universal Pictures.
If you’re in trouble around the Bakersfield, California, area and don’t want to go to the authorities, you go see private detective Honey O’Donahue (Qualley). Upon the recent death of Mia Novotny (Kara Petersen), a young girl involved in a car accident, Honey decides to poke around seeing as Honey had an appointment with Mia that’s now been cancelled due to her untimely demise, raising the curiosity of local homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day). Honey finds herself compelled to poke around Mia’s death between dealing with strife at her sister Heidi’s (Kristen Connolly) home and striking up a relationship with a police officer, MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), finding it’s a mystery she can’t let go of. As she does, clues begin to point in one direction: toward Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans) and his cult-like Four-Way Temple.
L-R: Aubrey Plaza as MG Falcone and Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue in HONEY DON’T!. Photo courtesy of Focus Features/Universal Pictures.
The following review is based on a Blu-ray retail copy provided by Allied Vaughn Entertainment. With this both being a home release review and publishing more than a month after its home release, rather than avoiding spoilers for a first-time review, we’re just going to dive right in.
Let’s go.
The script by Coen and Cooke borrows heavily from the gumshoes of dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories. There’s a no-nonsense private dick who’s got a clever mouth, a gift for pugilism, and a weakness for the wrong type of broad; an in-need client who doesn’t make it to the final reel (in this case the start of the first); and an unrepentant killer hiding in the cloister. Everything else — and I do mean everything else — that Honey engages with is little more than distraction. A distraction for Honey and us, which works out great as there’s plenty of hilarity in the horrific way that Hector (Jacnier), one of The Reverend’s drug dealers, accidentally murders a customer (who happens to also be tied to a different client of Honey’s) only to get dispatched himself in a differently hilarious circumstance. The violence, for the most part, comes from the intersection of The Reverend and Honey, but it’s all so circumstantial so the audience puts a lot of weight on it causing expectation to set in. This is the red herring and, if executed just a little differently, might carry the weight it’s intended to, but, upon the reveal that The Reverend is a shit-box of a person but not the one Honey’s looking for after all the time invested in showing us his narrative thread, one can easily feel like they’ve been duped instead of caught off-guard. The former leads to disappointment whereas the latter greats an air of mystery and intrigue. Unfortunately, through the structure of the film and the time spent with the characters, Coen and Cooke create an expectation that, despite the attempt at subversion and surprise, doesn’t ultimately satisfy. It certainly doesn’t help that the late inclusion of the return of Honey and Heidi’s father, while it serves to instigate niece Corinne’s (Talia Ryder) disappearance (creepy old man approaches young girl at night at a bus stop), it does more to speak to the selfishness and obviousness of men in their relationships with woman/their children and does little to serve the story as a whole. Fathers and daughters are a persistent theme in the film: Heidi has no visible male partner to help her manage her children, yet has several of varying ages with one more on the way; Honey is a lesbian with her own views on men; MG was abused by her’s; and it seems that Mia’s was less-engaged, just not in the way so that the scene with Honey and her father carries emotional weight or narrative impact.
This isn’t to suggest that the film doesn’t entertain or have some interesting ideas, even as it dabbles in the expected (small town clergyman manipulates his flock to sell his drugs and provide sexual gratification; private detective falls for the killer). Qualley’s Honey is dressed like a dame but thinks and kicks ass like a dick; the performance from the actor an amalgamation of decades of noir tales yet made entirely unique through the vulnerability that Qualley leaves just under the surface of the performance. This is someone who wants to help, who tries to point her clients in a positive, affirmative direction, even if it takes nearly being killed by a lover to realize she’s not doing as much as she could be. Likewise, Evans, on his streak of playing jackasses (Red One; Knives Out; Deadpool & Wolverine), conveys the right balance of charm and charisma that enables the audience to see why his flock would denigrate themselves for his benefit while also delighting in his eventual downfall. Plaza (Black Bear), however, perfectly matches Qualley, going beat-for-beat as the two flirt, decompress, and problem-solve as MG, a similarly defective human trying to make the world a better place than the one she grew up in. This last part is a necessity as we discover MG is the murderer Honey’s been looking for, Plaza delivering MG’s dime-store monologue with dripping venom while Qualley’s Honey processes the deception and violation. These two are incredible scene partners, so it’s not particularly surprising that both are returning for Go, Beavers!; it’s just a matter of whether they’re allies or not.
Chris Evans as Reverend Drew Devlin in HONEY DON’T!. Photo courtesy of Focus Features/Universal Pictures.
What’s particularly odd is that, like Dolls, Honey was distributed by Focus Features and, yet, the home release is positively barren. Once loaded, the menu offers either to start the film or to look at the meager setup options — no chapter selection, nothing. At least Dolls included three featurettes to allow fans to dig in a little more. Seeing as Universal Pictures All-Access does have two brief featurettes with members of the cast, someone, somewhere did sit down with the cast (at minimum) so where are they? Considering that the film is divisive for the way it tells its story compared to the way it was marketed, having even a single featurette to allow the director, writers, or cast to discuss the making of Honey Don’t! would go a long way for the curious and non-curious alike.
L-R: Co-writer Tricia Cooke, actor Margaret Qualley, and co-writer/director Ethan Coen on the set of HONEY DON’T!. Photo courtesy of Focus Features/Universal Pictures.
Though neither Drive-Away Dolls or Honey Don’t! has blown the doors off for audiences (myself included), I’d still sign up to see where Go, Beavers! takes us. There’s enough cleverness in the writing, in several scenes of both films especially, that curiosity compels one to discover what this final piece of their triptych entails and what it will cause to come into focus regarding the three stories. If we’re lucky, maybe then a new home release edition of Honey Don’t! will appear with supplemental materials that can either provide clarity or, at the least, dispel theories of intention.
No bonus features included with this home release.
Available on VOD and digital September 9th, 2025.
Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Peacock October 3rd, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Focus Features Honey Don’t! webpage.
Final Score: 2.5 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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