"Honey Don't!" - The Most Depressing "Comedy" Of the Year

In one of the most devastating filmmaking duo breakups of the 21st century, the Coen Bros. haven’t made a movie together since 2018 with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Joel has since doubled down on his roots in grime and darkness with The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, whereas Ethan seems to have proven which of the two got the directing talents in the divorce. His solo debut, Drive Away Dolls in 2024 was strange and meandering at best, with the occasional bout of hysterical laughter any time Beanie Feldstein appeared on screen. However, his most recent feature, Honey Don’t! seems to be on a whole new level entirely. It didn't take me long to find out that the title functions as more of a sick, yet tantalizing warning than anything else.

Honey Don't! immediately assaults its audience with potentially one of the most poorly presented opening credits I’ve ever seen. Poorly VFX’d onto various buildings in the film’s small town setting while the camera whizzes past them, only stopping in an occasional freeze frame so you can attempt to read the names. Even in the comfort of an AMC recliner with a fifty foot screen in front of me, it was often more than challenging to read through all of the blown out lighting. While I wouldn’t say much of anything else in the film reaches that level of egregiousness, it’s quite a way to start.

Even with the absolute nothing burger of a script that our leads had to work with, they all give decent performances. I’m still not a fan of the monotone delivery Margaret Qualley gives in these films, but her screen presence is as dominating as ever. Chris Evans is still great at being animated and loud, but if there was one person who actually made me laugh it was the always hilarious, Aubrey Plaza. Her sense of humor jives beautifully with Ethan Coen’s writing so including her in this film was a no-brainer, and the very few times I actually laughed were all because of her. 

What I found routinely frustrating about the comedy, it's that the actors are clearly fighting for their lives trying to make their dialogue work. Unfortunately, the direction and editing is stretched way too far over the line into awkwardness that it just becomes uncomfortable to sit through. There are several jokes in the film that have the potential to be funny, but the film’s refusal to either cut to a new angle, or shave the runtime down by a mere ten frames turns a funny moment into a frustrating one. 

Even more consistently damning than the timing of said angles is the angles themselves. It often feels as though there was never a master shot captured in some scenes, and each shot felt planned down to the frame. Performances are inconsistent from shot-to-shot, the 180 degree plane is violated beyond belief, and there wasn’t a single scene that felt like it had an old-school Coen Brothers rhythm to it. This is all made even more baffling by the fact that the cinematographer of this film is Ari Wegner, whose spectacular work on The Power of the Dog earned her a well-deserved Oscar nomination. 

Not to mention that Margaret Qualley's Honey may just be the single worst private investigator ever depicted on screen in a non-spoof fashion. The film is 89 minutes long, and there are still somehow multiple plot threads and sub-narratives that have no effect on our central characters or the overall story. The final 10 minutes are perhaps the most tonally, and thematically confused closing minutes I’ve seen in a film this year. A plot twist of sorts is presented incredibly jarringly, not because it’s clever, but because looking back on it, there is no way to possibly justify it, or hint that it was even a possibility. Furthermore, the actual final scene almost implies that the exact thing Honey just spent the whole film dealing with is going to start repeating itself because she can’t seem to keep her pants on…which I’m not sure is the message they wanted to convey, but it was the message I received. 

At the end of the day this was sadly the worst film directed by one of the Coen Brothers in the 41 years that they’ve been doing it together. I yearn for the day that Ethan’s sense of humor is back in a film that Joel directs, not just because Joel’s films could use a bit of levity, but also because Ethan’s humor deserves to be directed by someone who actually knows how to move a camera.