🍯 Honey Don’t! (2025): Ethan Coen’s Dark Comedy Noir – Cast, Plot, Release Date & What to Expect in Theaters

Honey Don’t! (2025): Ethan Coen’s Wild, Weird, and Wickedly Funny Noir Hits Theaters August 22

“Mystery. Murder. Margaritas. Bakersfield’s never looked so strange.”

Coming August 22, 2025, to theaters across the U.S., Honey Don’t! is set to crank up the weird and turn noir inside out. This dark comedy detective flick from Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski) marks his return to the genre he helped redefine—with a lot more laughs, lesbians, and late-night chaos.

Following the success of 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, Honey Don’t! is the second entry in Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy”—and it’s got all the ingredients of a cult classic in the making: cults, crooked cops, and questionable motives in sunny, seedy California.

🍯 Plot Tease: Who Is Honey O'Donahue?

Set in the strange underbelly of Bakersfield, California, the film follows Honey O’Donahue (played by Margaret

Qualley), a whip-smart, small-town private investigator with a taste for danger and deadpan one-liners.

When a string of bizarre deaths linked to a suspicious church rattles the community, Honey finds herself neck-deep in secrets, seductions, and small-town paranoia. At the center of it all? A mysterious cult leader named Drew (played with surprising menace by Chris Evans) and a sharp-tongued cop named MJ (Aubrey Plaza) with a few secrets of her own.

🎭 All-Star Cast of Eccentrics

• Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as Honey O’Donahue, a PI with more sass than subtlety

• Aubrey Plaza (The White Lotus) as MJ, a no-nonsense cop with a personal stake

• Chris Evans (Knives Out) as Drew, a charismatic and sinister cult leader

• Charlie Day (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as an offbeat fellow detective

• Billy Eichner, Gabby Beans, Talia Ryder, Lena Hall, and Don Swayze round out the film’s delightfully odd ensemble

With a 90-minute run time, the film promises a fast-paced and stylish ride through murder, mystery, and the bizarre.

🎬 Behind the Camera: The Coen-Cooke Touch

• Director: Ethan Coen

• Writers: Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke

• Cinematographer: Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog)

• Music: Carter Burwell, Coen’s longtime collaborator

• Edited by: Coen and Cooke

• Produced by: Coen, Cooke, Tim Bevan & Eric Fellner (Working Title Films)

With Focus Features handling distribution, and a Cannes 2025 Midnight Screening premiere on the books, Honey Don’t! is already generating buzz as one of the summer's strangest and smartest comedies.

🍸 Why You’ll Want to Watch

Think Chinatown meets Clue with a shot of mezcal and a feminist twist. Honey Don’t! delivers a bold blend of noir tropes, queer storytelling, sharp wit, and genre-bending weirdness. It’s a wild, witty take on the classic detective story—but don’t expect to leave with clean answers. This is Bakersfield, after all.

📅 Release Info

• World Premiere: Cannes Film Festival – Midnight Screenings (May 2025)

• U.S. Theatrical Release: August 22, 2025

• Distributor: Focus Features

• Runtime: 90 minutes

• Genre: Dark Comedy / Detective Noir

Final Verdict:

Honey Don’t! looks like a must-watch for fans of quirky thrillers, offbeat detectives, and off-the-wall comedy.

With Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza leading the charge—and Ethan Coen calling the shots—this might just be the most fun you’ll have at the movies this August.