Joel and Ethan Coen, the brother filmmakers who’ve given us Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and an improbable number of other great movies, haven’t worked together since the 2018 Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Honey Don’t!, Ethan’s latest solo endeavor, is bad enough to make you want to cast a spell forcing a reunion — to get Joel again compelled to make movies instead of, as he’s said, turn his attention toward theater. 

The movie is the younger Coen’s second film written and produced with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke — the first was last year’s noirish road-trip farce Drive-Away Dolls — and is said to be the middle chapter of what’s been referred to as their “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” (The sapphically inclined trio has been framed, most of all, as a pet project of Cooke, a lesbian who’s been in an open marriage with Coen for the last 30 years.) However in-one-ear-and-out-the-other Drive-Away Dolls was, it was daffy and likable; Honey Don’t!, in contrast, has early-draft wobbliness, haunted by a sinking feeling that it might have been pretty good with some more tinkering. 

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Photo credit: Karen Kuehn/Focus Features