Margaret Qualley Enters the Movie-Detective Canon

Margaret Qualley in ‘Honey, Don’t!’ – Credit: Karen Kuehn/Focus Feature

Down these mean streets of Bakersfield, California, a woman must go, who is not herself mean, who is neither tarnished (well, a little self-admittedly tarnished) nor afraid. She is the hero; she is everything. She is Honey O’Donoghue, and as played by Margaret Qualley in Honey Don’t! — a title borrowed from Carl Perkins’ 1957 hit that doubles as a command usually ignored by its lead character — this private detective is the perfect example of Raymond Chandler’s ideal protagonist. Only the couture and the chromosomes have changed.

Qualley is, by far, the best thing about director Ethan Coen’s tweaked spin on the gumshoe-mystery genre, and you can’t overstate how much her performance glides the movie over an abundance of rough patches and past dead-end detours. Honey is a recognizable archetype, the sort of pulp-fiction staple honed over decades of vintage publications, dog-eared paperbacks and B-movie double features. Such white knights with hourly rates are usually male and almost always straight, and while the idea of a queer female investigator poking around a case littered with corpses and double-crosses isn’t revolutionary in 2025, O’Donoghue is still an anomaly. The Substance actor never treats her as such, however. She’s simply a private dick who’s extremely good at what she does, who’s equally susceptible to femme fatales and flirtatious women, and who doesn’t like being made to play the sap. And the manner in which Qualley playfully pitches this P.I. at the perfect midpoint between screwball and hardboiled is what makes this movie work way better than it technically should.

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It starts, like most good noirish yarns, with a dead body. The fatality in a car wreck in the middle of the desert is a young woman who’d contacted O’Donoghue a few days before; she was, in fact, set to meet up with Honey later that afternoon. The cop on the scene, Detective Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day) — who, let’s say, isn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the marquee — is ready to label it a suicide. O’Donoghue suspects foul play. Given that we’ve already witnessed a mysterious, scooter-driving French woman (Lera Abova) remove a ring from the victim’s hand before the authorities arrive on the scene, we’re siding with Honey on this.

The jewelry with the odd symbol on it connects her would-be client to a local church known as the Four-Way Temple, run by the Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, fully ready to embrace his primo screen-douchebag era). This man of the cloth has some very peculiar ideas about sex and salvation, notably as it pertains to his fellowship with his female congregation. He’s also involved in some dodgy side hustles, which leads to a lot of peripheral gunplay and tangential, ha-ha–bang-bang set pieces that feel cherry-picked from Coen’s back catalog. Curdled Americana, crime, dumbasses, and ironic violence are several of the hallmarks of Ethan’s past work with his brother Joel, both of whom never met a yokel or a dead-eyed psychopath they could resist poking fun at or peppering their stories with. He’s continuing the tradition in his collaborations with co-writer, editor and wife Tricia Cooke — the couple were also responsible for 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, another flipped-script genre flick that also starred Qualley. Compared to that seven-car pileup of a road movie, Honey Don’t is practically a whipsmart thriller.

Coen and Cooke, who identifies as queer, have talked about both of these films being part of a loosely defined “Lesbian B-movie trilogy,” which reflects their wish to inject queer life and queer desire into top-shelf trash cinema. (A third film is in the works.) The duo’s original attempt never felt like it was more of the sum of its parts, as if someone had simply thrown Coen-esque mayhem and LBGTQ+ erotica into a blender together then forgot to hit the purée button. Honey Don’t‘s shaken mix of sunbaked Sapphic noir, pulp tropes turned sideways, and dark humor may still be messy, but it makes for a much more satisfying cocktail. And the idea of filtering this ideology through a private-detective story feels a lot more organic, notably when Aubrey Plaza’s MG Falcone shows up. She’s a cop who works at the same precinct as Metakawich, and likes the sound of O’Donghue’s “clickety-clack heels.” (It’s worth shouting out Peggy Schnitzer, whose impeccable costume design for Honey practically doubles as character development; clothes truly do help make the woman here.) The attraction is beyond mutual.

That the sex scenes between the two of them don’t feel overly salacious or the least bit gratuitous is a minor miracle, as well as a credit to the actors, who have a genuine chemistry with each other. Plaza also nails a postcoital speech that fills in her backstory to both Honey and the audience, as well as underlining the fact that both women are dealing with fucked-up father issues and traumatic pasts. In fact, virtually every female character is colored by the legacy of toxic males: pervy pastors, deadbeat dads, abusive boyfriends, murderous cretins. Even Marty, one of the nicer guys on display in Coen and Cooke’s cockeyed crime movie, hits on Honey with an annoying relentlessness. “I like girls,” O’Donoghue repeatedly informs him. “You always say that!” he replies, with a chuckle covered in seven layers of cluelessness. Not even Day’s 1000-watt congeniality can keep the barrage from bordering on disturbing.

But back to the saving grace, the main reason to seek out Honey Don’t and suffer through its lesser qualities. Qually has been consistently interesting onscreen, whether she’s stealing scenes from Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood or turning blink-and-miss turns in films like Poor Things into memorable moments. In projects like the limited series Maid, she’s able to inject humanity into what could have been a drama drowning in social-issue responsibility. And while she doesn’t bring a deeper history to The Substance like her costar Demi Moore, that modern body-horror classic still doesn’t work as well as it does without her.

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part. Cooke has said that though and she and Coen want to keep writing things for Qualley, they have no plans to make any further Honey O’Donoghue adventures anytime soon. We hope they eventually reconsider. The last thing we need is more film franchises, but we’d happily watch a whole other trilogy devoted to this sultry, take-no-shit sleuth.

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