I really wanted to like Honey Don’t! — but maybe this relationship was doomed from the start (spoilers incoming).
Honey Don’t! follows Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a private investigator following the case of a dead woman in a mysterious car crash. Her investigation entangles her with her semi-coworker MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), the cultish leader of a local church Drew Devlin (Chris Evans) and her niece Corinne (Talia Ryder). Amidst a string of church-related murders, Honey and MG have a whirlwind romance that turns deadly when MG is revealed to have connections to the church.
Admittedly, I am trying my hardest to like the movie. I love the unhinged relationship between Honey and MG that moves faster than light. And I love Honey as a whole, thanks to Margaret Qualley’s excellent acting, which endears her to me despite the fact that her character is barely fleshed out.
This is a decent movie in the first half. The opening credits are so creative, using murals and storefronts to show names and faces. The balance of comedic and dark with the increasing string of murders builds suspense for a compelling mystery. Only, that mystery never gets resolved.
The movie consistently demonstrates an extremely underdeveloped and incoherent plot. There are so many events that happen that never go anywhere and are not particularly built up to. Drew’s death sort of just happens, and the caught-during-sex gag is awkward and adds nothing to the plot at this point. Drew is then never referenced again. Honey’s father makes an appearance as something between an emotional moment and a punchline and then never makes an appearance again. The entrance of Honey’s father is a possible major factor in the disappearance of Corinne, but that is also never addressed. The unease and emotional punch in the scene where Hector, a youth involved with the church, finds his abuela murdered is amazing with its framing. Hector takes down hanging laundry, and each article obscures the view and continually reveals nothing. And then when you think the tension is over, the scene reveals the open door. But this also never gets resolved, just explodes into a knife-gun-fight where the three deaths add nothing to the plot.
The climactic reveal of MG’s intentions all along is executed quite well, though it also feels like a dying cry of a movie that has literally lost the plot. We find out that someone else is covering her shift and she is ignoring Honey’s attempts at contacts. And when Honey makes her way to an address of MG’s, amidst unsettling music, we learn alongside Honey that MG was a “youth missionary.” But this reveal ends with a quick conversation-turned-gunfight that lasts perhaps five minutes. We get maybe a larger glimpse into MG’s character, but it feels quite reductive in the way it literally flattens her to a one-dimensional villain who hates victims and brutally killed her father. Even this glimpse is short-lived, as MG dies within five minutes of the reveal, and we are left wondering what exactly the point of her character was.
Perhaps the most developed relationships are between Honey and her sister’s family, especially her niece Corinne. However, the arc where Corinne goes missing also never has a proper resolution. It is implied in a throwaway line that she may have been involved in the evil church, but she just reappears after Honey is found without any explanation. This can be fine, but in this context it just feels sloppy. And this makes the underwhelming 88-minute runtime feel worse.
I quite like movies where nothing really happens and it is just vibes. I also like characters that do not necessarily make decisions that directly address the plot. But this series of events meshes together poorly, and the vibes are just off. Honey’s male coworker keeps making advances on her despite her establishing she only likes girls. This gag never has a point; it is just repeated to an awkward and uncomfortable point. A similar thing happens with the repetition of unclothed women interrupted mid-sex scene with Drew, which has no purpose in the plot and just feels distasteful, especially because there is little that it actually does for the film. Drew’s character is awful, but at a certain point, the “sex-haha-funny” tone of each reveal is just incredibly unnecessary — and it has no resolution because he dies, and nothing really happens about it.
Although the ending is quite open-ended and not substantially built up to, I liked it. I like that Honey continues this insane cycle of flirting with and falling for evil, murderous girls, especially because of the name reveal for Cher (and the attempt at continuity, as the movie opens with her) and how open-ended it is. Is Honey doomed to repeat these crazy trysts over and over? But the film is so stubbornly incoherent that I cannot bring myself to care to find an answer.
Maybe the moral of this story is to shoot the problems I have, since then they’ll all go away and never appear again. Or maybe it is to flirt with evil women, which both I and Honey will happily do. Either way, Honey Don’t! is an absurd, underwhelming mess, though I am still trying to salvage the positives of my time with it.
Pen Fang is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
