When Joel Coen made a black and white adaptation of Macbeth and Ethan Coen made a sex-filled comic caper with his lesbian wife, audiences broke down the longtime duo like a math problem. Joel brings the arty seriousness; Ethan brings the silly comedy. But art is not an equation and genre is not a binary. Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen’s second collaboration Honey Don’t! is proof of that fact. They’ve crafted a film with an air of farce that ultimately finds more pain than humor in our outlandish world.

Honey Don’t! is about a private detective in central California named Honey O’Donnaughey (Margaret Qualley). She’s an old-fashioned private dick who prefers a rolodex and a landline to a computer. After a prospective client dies in a car crash, she begins to suspect that a local reverend (Chris Evans) is up to no good. Other threads include a gay man played by Billy Eichner who suspects his boyfriend is cheating, Honey’s teenage niece (Talia Ryder) in an abusive relationship, and a new romance Honey sparks up with a cop named M.G. (Aubrey Plaza).

In the tradition of California neo-noirs like The Long Goodbye, the plot mechanics here are secondary. Honey may think she’s trying to solve the mystery of the car crash and the church, but what she’s really trying to understand is the cruelty of human beings. Unlike other noir riffs like Inherent Vice, Cooke and Coen set this film in the present with explicit references to COVID and Trump. While it requires suspension of disbelief to reconcile the contemporary references with the retro aesthetics and genre conventions, it also gives the film an uncomfortable urgency. Even if Honey Don’t! exists in its own stylized world, it makes sure we’re never having too much fun to forget our own.

But the film does have its fun. Tricia Cooke promised us more lesbian sex, and she has delivered! It’s just that watching Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza use anal beads is less fun when one of them is a cop, something the film understands. Watching Chris Evans return to his Not Another Teen Movie comedy roots is fun too until the violence ordered by his character gets a little too real. Honey Don’t! is a seduction. The film itself is a femme fatale. It’s erotic and hilarious and seems ready to take us on an adventure. But just when the audience leans in for a kiss, it turns into something more sinister. It becomes difficult, thought-provoking, hard to like and just as easy to love.

At one point, the reverend tells Honey that she doesn’t like people. Throughout the movie this proves to be true. What’s to like amid all the cruelty, stupidity, and betrayal? But she does have one weakness: sex. There’s no intellectualizing when it comes to sex. There’s just desire. Someone doesn’t have to be perfect to turn you on.

You don’t have to like people to fuck them — the reverend makes this clear — but there’s something kind of pure about what the way sex prevents Honey from tipping completely into misanthropy. It’s as if there’s a biological force pushing her toward people (women) sometimes to her detriment.

There’s a clear throughline between the Coen Cinematic Universe’s most famous film Fargo and this latest work. There is more lesbian sex and no gold-hearted cop fantasy, but there’s the same melancholy frustration with human cruelty and senseless violence. However, where that film found easy answers in its good apple protagonist, Honey Don’t! lives in the complication. I know I said collaborations can’t be split in two, but let’s just say those complications feel pretty queer.

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