Honey Don’t! Ethan Coen’s wry twist on classic noir with Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Margaret Qualley

In Honey Don’t! a straight-shooting private eye named Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) runs around the sketchy side of Bakersfield, California, in a red dress and heels.

It’s an impractical outfit for checking out a crime scene at the base of a rocky hillside — as she does, in the beginning of the film, to inspect the mysterious circumstances around a young woman’s fatal car crash.

Honey’s looks may scream femme fatale, but she’s more Humphrey Bogart than Barbara Stanwyck, with a shrewd, melancholic gaze and smooth drawl that makes it clear that she’s seen things.

Honey’s smarts are no joke, but there’s something cheeky about her girlie get-up — and the way she sticks out amid her drab surroundings. What kind of movie are we in? A hard-boiled detective story? Tongue-in-cheek neo-noir? Screwball thriller?

Since the 1980s, this kind of flipping and reversing of genre templates has been the Coen brothers’ stock in trade. With a penchant for dark humour and absurdity, Joel and Ethan Coen remixed Hollywood genres until the late 2010s, when the brothers began embarking on solo projects.

Ethan Coen directed Honey Don’t! and wrote it with his wife, Tricia Cooke, a longtime editor on the brothers’ films. It’s the second narrative feature by the couple and is a kind of sister movie to the first, Drive-Away Dolls (2024), which stars Qualley as a freewheeling lesbian who becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy that involves a dildo collection.

Joel, on the other hand, went for a relatively straightforward (if visually inventive) adaptation of Shakespeare for his first solo work, The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, so I’m inclined to assume that Ethan is the one with the funny bone, and in Cooke, he’s found a collaborator who seems to match his love for the risqué.

Ticking that naughty box in Honey Don’t! is the Rev Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), the cult leader of a shady organisation called the Four-Way Temple. More a vainglorious bro than a mind-bending Svengali, Drew becomes a suspect in the car-crash investigation, though most of the times we see him, he’s in bed with a new parishioner (or three).

Naturally, he tries to put the moves on Honey when she goes to his office to question him, but dealing with lusty male suitors isn’t unusual for her. Marty (Charlie Day), her smitten pal in the police department, can’t quite accept that she’s into women. MG (Aubrey Plaza), another police officer, has better luck.

The film brings together wry, weird, sometimes cruel snapshots into the lives of Honey and the people around her. Mr Siegfried (Billy Eichner) seeks out Honey’s services to confirm that his boyfriend is cheating, and said boyfriend becomes involved in a grisly revenge cycle triggered by one of the Four-Way Temple’s cronies.

In the meantime, a blunt-banged Frenchwoman creeps around town, and the result is a brutal death. Honey’s teenage niece, Corinne (Talia Ryder), seeks out Honey’s help after her boyfriend assaults her — and at the hot dog shop where Corinne works, she’s menaced by a sinister-looking man.

All together, these events feel deliberately random. Coen joints often tell us that life is full of bizarre, unpredictable happenings — and Cooke’s deadpan editing rhythms have made these surprises land to great tragicomic effect.

But, here, Cooke and Coen’s winding narrative feels muted and underdeveloped, making the film’s offscreen deaths and treacherous reveals feel less like cosmic twists of fate than speed bumps that yield small chuckles and sighs.

Even the sex jokes feel lazy: a leather harness slipping out from under a white ceremonial garment at the victim’s house, for example, or Honey cleaning sex toys after a passionate night with MG. Qualley’s straight-faced demeanour gives these scenes an amusing dryness, but I can’t get over the feeling that the film wants to push my buttons with minimal effort.

In its best moments — which usually include Qualley and Plaza — Honey Don’t! strikes a balance between sincere and silly. One night in bed, Honey and MG share childhood traumas; their voices are low and gravelly, and they’re looking directly forward as if they were weathered cowboys staring out at a merciless desert.

Later in the movie, when Honey confronts Corrine’s abuser, she smacks an “I have a vagina and I vote” sticker on top of a MAGA decal, which is perhaps the most direct statement of the film’s intent. Scrambling the conventions of genre isn’t just a stylistic trick, it’s a way of upending our preconceptions about the United States and the categories and settings we assume certain people belong in.

Honey Don’t! out August 28, 88 minutes, rated MA+

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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