{"id":13564,"date":"2025-08-21T09:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T09:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/13564\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T09:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T09:36:07","slug":"margaret-qualley-enters-the-movie-detective-canon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/13564\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Qualley Enters the Movie-Detective Canon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Down these mean streets of Bakersfield, California, a woman must go, who is not herself mean, who is neither tarnished (well, a\u00a0little\u00a0self-admittedly tarnished) nor afraid. She is the hero; she is everything. She is Honey O\u2019Donoghue, and as played by\u00a0Margaret Qualley<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Honey Don\u2019t!\u00a0\u2014 a title borrowed from Carl Perkins\u2019 1957 hit that doubles as a command usually ignored by its lead character \u2014 this private detective is the perfect example of Raymond Chandler\u2019s ideal protagonist. Only the couture and the chromosomes have changed.<\/p>\n

Qualley is, by far, the best thing about director\u00a0Ethan Coen<\/a>\u2018s tweaked spin on the gumshoe-mystery genre, and you can\u2019t overstate how much her performance glides the movie over an abundance of rough patches and past dead-end detours. Honey is a recognizable archetype, the sort of pulp-fiction staple honed over decades of vintage publications, dog-eared paperbacks and B-movie double features. Such white knights with hourly rates are usually male and almost always straight, and while the idea of a queer female investigator poking around a case littered with corpses and double-crosses isn\u2019t revolutionary in 2025, O\u2019Donoghue is still an anomaly.\u00a0The Substance\u00a0actor never treats her as such, however. She\u2019s simply a private dick who\u2019s extremely good at what she does, who\u2019s equally susceptible to\u00a0femme fatales\u00a0and flirtatious women, and who doesn\u2019t like being made to play the sap. And the manner in which Qualley playfully pitches this P.I. at the perfect midpoint between screwball and hardboiled is what makes this movie work way better than it technically should.<\/p>\n

It starts, like most good noirish yarns, with a dead body. The fatality in a car wreck in the middle of the desert is a young woman who\u2019d contacted O\u2019Donoghue a few days before; she was, in fact, set to meet up with Honey later that afternoon. The cop on the scene, Detective Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day) \u2014 who, let\u2019s say, isn\u2019t exactly the brightest bulb on the marquee \u2014 is ready to label it a suicide. O\u2019Donoghue suspects foul play. Given that we\u2019ve already witnessed a mysterious, scooter-driving French woman (Lera Abova) remove a ring from the victim\u2019s hand before the authorities arrive on the scene, we\u2019re siding with Honey on this.<\/p>\n

The jewelry with the odd symbol on it connects her would-be client to a local church known as the Four-Way Temple, run by the Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, fully ready to embrace his primo screen-douchebag era). This man of the cloth has some very peculiar ideas about sex and salvation, notably as it pertains to his fellowship with his female congregation. He\u2019s also involved in some dodgy side hustles, which leads to a lot of peripheral gunplay and tangential, ha-ha\u2013bang-bang set pieces that feel cherry-picked from Coen\u2019s back catalog. Curdled Americana, crime, dumbasses, and ironic violence are several of the hallmarks of Ethan\u2019s past work with his brother Joel, both of whom never met a yokel or a dead-eyed psychopath they could resist poking fun at or peppering their stories with. He\u2019s continuing the tradition in his collaborations with co-writer, editor and wife Tricia Cooke \u2014 the couple were also responsible for 2024\u2019s\u00a0Drive-Away Dolls,\u00a0another flipped-script genre flick that also starred Qualley. Compared to that seven-car pileup of a road movie,\u00a0Honey Don\u2019t\u00a0is practically a whipsmart thriller.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\" <\/p>\n

Aubrey Plaza<\/a>\u00a0and Margaret Qualley in \u2018Honey Don\u2019t!\u2019<\/strong>Focus Features<\/p>\n

Coen and Cooke, who identifies as queer, have talked about both of these films being part of a loosely defined \u201cLesbian B-movie trilogy,\u201d which reflects their wish to inject queer life and queer desire into top-shelf trash cinema. (A third film is in the works.) The duo\u2019s original attempt never felt like it was more of the sum of its parts, as if someone had simply thrown Coen-esque mayhem and LBGTQ+ erotica into a blender together then forgot to hit the pur\u00e9e button.\u00a0Honey Don\u2019t\u2018s shaken mix of sunbaked Sapphic noir, pulp tropes turned sideways, and dark humor may still be messy, but it makes for a much more satisfying cocktail. And the idea of filtering this ideology through a private-detective story feels a lot more organic, notably when Aubrey Plaza\u2019s MG Falcone shows up. She\u2019s a cop who works at the same precinct as Metakawich, and likes the sound of O\u2019Donghue\u2019s \u201cclickety-clack heels.\u201d (It\u2019s worth shouting out Peggy Schnitzer, whose impeccable costume design for Honey practically doubles as character development; clothes truly do help make the woman here.) The attraction is beyond mutual.<\/p>\n

That the sex scenes between the two of them don\u2019t feel overly salacious or the least bit gratuitous is a minor miracle, as well as a credit to the actors, who have a genuine chemistry with each other. Plaza also nails a postcoital speech that fills in her backstory to both Honey and the audience, as well as underlining the fact that both women are dealing with fucked-up father issues and traumatic pasts. In fact, virtually every female character is colored by the legacy of toxic males: pervy pastors, deadbeat dads, abusive boyfriends, murderous cretins. Even Marty, one of the nicer guys on display in Coen and Cooke\u2019s cockeyed crime movie, hits on Honey with an annoying relentlessness. \u201cI like girls,\u201d O\u2019Donoghue repeatedly informs him. \u201cYou\u00a0always\u00a0say that!\u201d he replies, with a chuckle covered in seven layers of cluelessness. Not even Day\u2019s 1000-watt congeniality can keep the barrage from bordering on disturbing.<\/p>\n

But back to the saving grace, the main reason to seek out\u00a0Honey Don\u2019t\u00a0and suffer through its lesser qualities. Qually has been consistently interesting onscreen, whether she\u2019s stealing scenes from Brad Pitt in\u00a0Once Upon a Time\u2026in Hollywood\u00a0or turning blink-and-miss turns in films like\u00a0Poor Things\u00a0into memorable moments. In projects like the limited series\u00a0Maid,\u00a0she\u2019s able to inject humanity into what could have been a drama drowning in social-issue responsibility. And while she doesn\u2019t bring a deeper history to\u00a0The Substance\u00a0like her costar Demi Moore, that modern body-horror classic still doesn\u2019t work as well as it does without her.<\/p>\n

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O\u2019Donoghue, however, feels unique. You\u2019re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall\u2019s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons\u2019 respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It\u2019s truly a great sync-up of performer and part. Cooke has said that though and she and Coen want to keep writing things for Qualley, they have no plans to make any further Honey O\u2019Donoghue adventures anytime soon. We hope they eventually reconsider. The last thing we need is more film franchises, but we\u2019d happily watch a whole other trilogy devoted to this sultry, take-no-shit sleuth.<\/p>\n

From Rolling Stone US.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Down these mean streets of Bakersfield, California, a woman must go, who is not herself mean, who is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[11145,18,117,12714,19,17,10151,327],"class_list":{"0":"post-13564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-aubrey-plaza","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ethan-coen","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-margaret-qualley","15":"tag-movies"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}