Hello there, gorgeous gumshoes!
It’s not exactly top secret that I love a good mystery. I have always loved a good mystery, from Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, from Easy Rawlins on the page to Murder, She Wrote on the screen. Yet I had never truly seen myself in any of those stories, at least not as a bi woman.
That’s why the trailer for Honey Don’t! immediately caught my attention. A Coen Brothers movie with Margaret Qualley as a sapphic detective and Aubrey Plaza as her flirtatious foil? I had to see if my bi detective dreams were finally coming true? I had to find out and report back.
But first, some disclaimers. First and foremost, there will be SPOILERS for this 2025 mystery-dramedy. Second, I should give some content warnings, including but not limited to: murder (duh), discussions of religious cults, and lurid sex scenes, to start. Finally, if you’re not familiar with our Unicorn metric, you can learn more here.
Got it? Ok, my sexually fluid sleuths, off we go.
Honey O’Donahue (Qualley) is a private detective who starts following a trail when a client in Bakersfield, California, mysteriously dies in a car accident the day after she had called her for her PI services. Honey’s pursuit of the truth brings her across a slew of clues and characters, each more puzzling than the last. Honey Don’t! is the second in a “lesbian B-movie trilogy” by Coen, the first being Drive-Away Dolls.
What I Liked:
There’s a lot to enjoy here in the sapphic vein. As made clear from the trailers, Honey is a lesbian and, yes, Plaza’s character, a cop named MG, is attracted to and starts a relationship with Honey. I had suspected that this would be the bi character. But, like any good mystery, my expectations were upended, and it turned out to be another supporting character, Chère (Lera Abova).
Chère is a French woman and the first person we see in the film, at the original scene of the crime, assessing a body in the capsized car in a ditch before removing a religious ring from the corpse. It’s easy to presume she had something to do with the death, but the film subverts our expectations. Instead, we find out that Chère is actually a liaison for a drug cartel providing a street-front church led by Reverend Drew (Chris Evans) with an illicit substance. Then the church distributes the payload. So Chère removed the ring so the product could not be linked back to the church. Later, she has a sexual liaison with Drew before offing him, but also ends up flirting with Honey in the final scene of the film.
Chère’s character is an intriguing one — she is funny but mysterious, clever and observant but not without her faults.
Honey Don’t! builds around a charged moment of queer flirtation. Honey comes across the aftermath of Drew’s death. She does not see Chère pull the trigger, but she does see her fleeing the scene. It is never clear whether Chère notices Honey before slipping into traffic. A tilt of her head suggests she might, but the sunglasses hide her eyes, and she could just as easily be checking for cars.
In the final scene, Honey flirts with Chère at an intersection, and the attraction between them is unmistakable. Is Honey using this chance to uncover what really happened to Reverend Drew? Or is Chère seizing the moment to deal with a potential witness? The truth is uncertain, but the spark between them is undeniable.
I do also like that Abova is on the record as being bi, so we do have a bi person playing a bi character here, which is always a plus.
What I Didn’t Like:
Of course, as always, I wish the word “bi” had emerged anywhere in the script. We also have a stereotypical sexy French femme fatale character here, though her character is not entirely defined by her sexuality. But the other part of her that is defined is that she is a drug dealer and a killer. I’m all for messy bis, but Chère doesn’t feel like she got the full treatment she deserved to make her fully intriguing. But in hardboiled detective series, those are hard to come by; usually, most (if not all) of the characters are morally gray, so this isn’t an exception. Truly, if there are any decent or innocent characters, they tend to be the murder victims (though sometimes not even then)!
The Rating:
Like most mysteries, Honey Don’t! has a few topics it explores that have nothing to do with the mystery at all. This one tends to focus on the exploitation tactics used by organized religion — and particularly cults — to prey on young women, and the systems that fail to support those same girls. That it has a sapphic twist leads to some expectations I didn’t know I had wanted subverted until I saw them on the big screen. But as far as bi representation in mysteries, Chère is funny but thinly drawn at best, and could have used more fleshing out. That said, I wouldn’t be mad to catch a sequel to see what she gets up to next.
