Honey Dont! opens in U.S. theaters as Coen-Cooke's second neo-noir

Honey Dont!, the second entry in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s lesbian B-movie trilogy, opens in U.S. theaters this weekend with Margaret Qualley portraying Honey O’Donahue, a sharp-eyed private detective in Bakersfield who investigates a death tied to a local religious cult. Aubrey Plaza plays a police officer who becomes entwined in the investigation, and Chris Evans portrays the cult’s would-be spiritual leader. The film, directed by Coen and co-written with Cooke, continues the duo’s offbeat, genre-bending approach to queer storytelling and arrives after last year’s DriveAway Dolls, which established their distinctive tone and earned a mix of critical attention and audience curiosity.

The project’s lineage is central to its public interest. DriveAway Dolls—initially conceived under a far more provocative title—was the precursor to a planned trilogy that Coen and Cooke describe as exploring lesbian-tinged genre cinema. They have explained that the pair did not set out to make three films, but the experience compelled them to extend the idea into a trilogy once the second film took shape. The couple has also discussed a potential third installment, which they describe as...