Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s Honey Don’t! essay contains spoilers. Ethan Coen’s 2025 film features Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

You have to look towards the peripheries of the Coen brothers’ filmography to find any traces of queerness. In The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and Hail, Caesar! (2016), there are inferences towards supporting characters living closeted lives at a time when homosexuality was illegal, while the dense plotting of Miller’s Crossing (1990) manages, in the opinion of many, to hide an openly gay love triangle in plain sight. There’s an admirably blasé nature to Miller’s Crossing, with characters using the parlance of gangster films and pulp noir — referring to somebody as being someone’s “boy,” for example — with such a casual approach that it allows the material to fly over even attentive queer viewers’ heads at first glance. And for what it’s worth,The Man Who Wasn’t There inspired an elaborate fan theory that its emotionally numb lead (Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane) represses his sexuality.

It’s not that queerness has ever been absent from the Coen brothers’ stories so much as the siblings have never found it a particularly big deal, as they are perhaps the only major straight-male American filmmakers of their era to never indulge in cheap gay panic or the idea of sexuality as a joke. The Coens have just never been heralded this way because they’ve never purposefully drawn attention to their work in this context; as famously tricky interview subjects who refuse to outline any in-depth reading afforded to their films, this comes as little surprise. Ethan’s first narrative feature as a solo director, Drive-Away Dolls (2024), was met with a divisive response which still feels unnecessarily vitriolic for a film with such modest aims, paying homage to bawdy B-movies and Russ Meyer flicks while still feeling unmistakably Coen-esque. This was, admittedly, due to the feeling that Ethan and co-writer/long-term partner Tricia Cooke borrowed certain plot points from the superior Burn After Reading (2008), but the character quirks, messy crime plot and surprisingly earnest central relationship dynamic never feel derivative. Drive-Away Dolls is shamelessly lowbrow, but with an artisanal sheen.

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The couple’s second film of a planned trilogy, Honey Don’t!, promises more of the same, and has been greeted by detractors since its May 2025 Cannes premiere as exactly that — a lowbrow endeavor unworthy of its highly gifted creator. The broad, unwavering consensus has been that if you liked Drive-Away Dolls, you’ll like this one too, or at the very least prefer it to the more austere, serious-minded solo work of Ethan’s brother, Joel. (Can we all admit that The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) is utterly boring?)

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It was this line of thinking which made me eager to cover Honey Don’t! in this column, assuming there would be as much for me to defend as there is with Coen’s previous outing. There was the promise of a self-satirizing queering of a typical neo-noir plot and ample sex comedy — two constituent elements that are rare onscreen in the current age. In practice, none of these elements gel in the way they do in the director’s prior effort, with various half-baked plots forced together into an unsatisfying Frankenstein’s Monster of a screenplay, and no comic salvation to be found to make up for these faults. Coen and Cooke’s previously established wit seems to have taken a leave of absence.

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In Honey Don’t!, Qualley stars as the eponymous Honey O’Donoghue, introduced at the beginning during an investigation surrounding a client who died in a suspicious car crash just hours after she had met with the protagonist. After obtaining details from a police officer she has an intense flirtation with (Aubrey Plaza’s MG Falcone), Honey visits the deceased’s family and discovers she was a member of the Four-Way Congregation — a cult of personality masquerading as a church, led by a sleazy reverend (Chris Evans as Drew Devlin) who simultaneously uses it as a way to get laid and a front for an elaborate drug trafficking operation. The murder threatens to bring unwanted attention their way, but a ploy to tie up any loose ends only increases the body count within the reverend’s enterprise.

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At a purely surface level, Honey Don’t! endeavors to push all the same buttons as its disreputable queer influences, not least its streak of anti-organized religion satire, which begins and ends with a reverend shagging his way through a congregation while dressed in ceremonial attire — hardly the most provocative imagery, even at a time the religious right have had an unfortunate cultural resurgence. Coen’s attempt at button-pushing feels tired instead of shocking, which is particularly damning considering how contentious depictions of queer sexuality have become in U.S. President Donald Trump’s America. When even the most milquetoast representation can trigger calls for boycotts from the bigoted, there’s something telling about a wide-release studio film which doesn’t shy away from critiquing religion, or depicting the realities of lesbian sex, coming and going without generating even an inch of the controversy it’s courting. John Waters, this is not.

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If Drive-Away Dolls eventually builds to a near-identical gag as Burn After Reading’s notorious reveal of an invention created by George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, Honey Don’t! is far less specific in how it borrows from Ethan’s earlier films with Joel. There’s no shortage of movies in their back catalogue — going all the way back to their feature debut Blood Simple (1984) — which deal with a criminal plan gone awry, with several character miscalculations leading to a high body count and nobody succeeding in their aims. The marketing for Honey Don’t! foregrounded this, a trailer title card winking that this was from “A Director of No Country For Old Men and Fargo” — two very different tales cut from the same cloth. But even as you’d teach neither of those films in a screenwriting class, due to how the brothers take delight in screwing with storytelling machinations, both are never less than intriguing for the wholehearted embrace of their character’s unconventional motivations, with their narrative directions always in doubt on a scene-to-scene basis. That blend of intrigue, dark comedy and purposeful chaos is missing in action in Honey Don’t!, as the messiness features like a bug, due to execution far less assured than we’ve come to expect from one half of the Oscar-winning filmmaker team.

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However, in a column about queer cinema, the most important thing to consider when debating a film’s canon consideration is whether or not it offers anything impactful in its transgressions. Could the movie shift the paradigm in our current conservative era in the same vein as its influences, or illuminate on contemporary gay life in any way? The reason the answer is no for both Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! is perhaps the biggest disappointment — if the 2024 film feels like Coen interpolating influences not seen in his previous work, the 2025 release feels like a flat, uninspired retread of his most beloved films, executed without any semblance of imagination or inspiration. Aside from the half-assed plotting, the biggest flaw of Honey Don’t! is that even with Cooke’s involvement, the sexuality of the protagonists lacks any sort of perceptive depth, with no inter-character dynamic feeling more lived-in than the plot needs it to be. It’s all window dressing, and not particularly provocative window dressing at that.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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