HONEY DON’T

No. This is a thriller that would rather shock you than tell you a good story. A lesbian private detective investigates a murder tied to a corrupt pastor running drugs for a cartel — a premise with real potential — but the film spends far more energy on explicit sex scenes and brutal violence than on building a coherent mystery.

The violence is extreme in places: a three-way knife fight that kills an elderly grandmother, a man run over not once but twice. The sexual content is just as heavy, with full frontal nudity and repeated explicit scenes. Add nearly three dozen profanities, cocaine use, and a worldview that condemns the pastor's hedonism while celebrating the heroine's own, and there's very little redeeming ground to stand on.

Skip this one. Your time and your conscience have better places to go.

Honey O'Donoughue is a tough-talking private eye in Bakersfield, California. When a young woman from a strange hybrid Christian-New Age church turns up dead — after calling Honey the day before to report something disturbing at her church — Honey starts digging. The church's silver-tongued pastor has plenty to hide, including a side business selling drugs for a French cartel. As Honey pulls the thread, her teenage niece suddenly goes missing. Whether the two cases connect is where the film picks up — and where we leave off.

Two stars means the craft here is thin, and the source is direct about why. The film is "muddled," more concerned with shocking its audience through explicit sex and graphic violence than with building a serious or entertaining mystery. Plot logic gets sacrificed for spectacle — at one point, a woman standing outside a building hears a gunshot and, inexplicably, never goes to check on it.

The film also loses focus by dwelling at length on its protagonist's sex life and the pastor's, time that could have gone to tightening the actual mystery. What's left is a thriller that trades suspense for shock value, and comes up short as either.

This film runs on a strong humanist, feminist, anti-male worldview, and it treats Christian faith as a costume for predation. Its pastor is a "hybrid Christian-New Age" figure who counsels and seduces his female congregants while running a violent drug operation — the film has real contempt for his hedonism, but it applies a double standard, celebrating the same hedonism in its own heroine. Scripture has a name for leaders like this pastor: "Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!" (Jeremiah 23:1).

The film's anti-male current runs through both of its central women, who share a backstory of abusive fathers — a real wound, though the film's answer seems to be that men in general can't be trusted, rather than that brokenness can be healed. Ironically, the women in this story are shown to be capable of real viciousness themselves, which undercuts the film's own argument.

Worth noting once, plainly: this film continues a specific authorial project — a companion piece to last year's similarly themed film from the same director and co-writer — built around normalizing same-sex relationships and hedonism as liberation. That is a deliberate throughline in the work, not incidental detail.

Underneath the shock value is a real ache — for a spiritual authority that doesn't exploit, for love that doesn't wound. Scripture points to a shepherd who actually keeps his sheep: "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (John 10:11).

There's a real mystery buried somewhere in here — a corrupt pastor, a cartel, a missing teenager — but the filmmakers seem more interested in shocking you than telling it well. Between the graphic sex, brutal violence, heavy profanity, and a worldview that mocks faith while excusing its own hero's excess, there's nothing here worth your evening. Skip it. For something worth your family's time instead, see.