'Honey Don’t' Movie Ending Explained & Summary: What Does The Last Scene Symbolize?

Ethan Coen’s 2025 film, Honey Don’t!, really looks and feels like a B-movie of yesteryear because of its rustic aesthetics and the generally superficial dialogue and characters, all of which is intentional. The plot is centered around a private investigator named Honey O’Donahue, who gets embroiled in a dangerous serial killer plot when a prospective client of hers passes away in a mysterious car crash in Bakersfield, California. Overall, Honey Don’t does not have much depth or thrill, but it still makes for a delightful watch because of the touch of dark comedy and also some excellent performances.

Spoiler Alert

What is the film about?

Honey Don’t begins with a woman walking down the steep and rocky side of a hill to get to the site of a car crash that has just recently taken place, with her being in a hurry to tamper with the scene before the police arrive. As the recorded sermons of some local church still play on the sound system of the crashed and overturned car, the woman approaches it and gets hold of the clearly dead driver. She then pulls a ring off the finger of the dead driver, who is also a woman, and then quickly leaves the place with the ring, riding away on her scooter. Elsewhere, in the city of Bakersfield, a woman named Honey is woken up by a phone call, as she receives information about the car accident and immediately rushes to the spot to take a look for herself.

Honey O’Donahue is a private investigator by profession, and as it so happens, the woman who had died in the car crash, Mia Novotny, was her prospective client. Mia had visited Honey’s office only the previous day, and had wanted to hire the PI for some undisclosed purpose, but since the detective did not actually give her any serious consideration, her sudden death now becomes a very mysterious matter for Honey. She takes a quick look at the dead body, all while conversing with the local homicide detective, Marty Metakawich, who keeps trying to flirt with her, as he always does. Despite being a lesbian and making her identity clear to Marty, the police detective does not actually believe her and keeps thinking that it is just an outrageous lie that she tells him to reject his advances.

Soon, Honey heads to Mia’s address and talks to her parents, who are more invested in trying to prove their financial well-being than helping her with any information about their daughter. The couple, just like the police, are convinced that Mia must have been killed in an accidental car crash. However, Honey suspects some foul play because of the woman having approached her to take her case earlier, and she is even more intrigued upon finding a connection between Mia and a local cult-like church called the Four-Way Temple. Thus, the private detective continues to investigate the case, and especially the leader of the church, Reverend Drew Devlin, while a series of developments in her personal life take place at the same time.

What happens to Hector?

Soon after the death of Mia Novotny, Honey has a new potential client at her office, Mr. Siegfried, who has come to her seeking help with an extremely private matter. Siegfried believes that his husband is having an affair, and so he wants Honey to get hold of evidence to prove the adultery. However, the protagonist does not find any interest in such cases, because she feels that clients who come to her looking for help with their cheating partners or spouses are already at a disadvantage. In almost all such situations, people consult a detective only when they feel something’s significantly off about their partners, which in itself is an indication that they might be having an affair. Therefore, Honey advises Siegfried to not waste money trying to prove what he already knows is true and refuses to help him, despite her technically losing out on potential income because of the decision. Unbeknownst to her, Honey gets even more caught up with the Four-Way Temple and its criminal ways in this manner.

Mr. Siegfried’s cheating husband actually happens to be a regular buyer of the drugs that are secretly produced and sold by the leader of Four-Way Temple, Rev. Drew Devlin. On one usual night, he goes to a fancy club to meet a date, which confirms that he was indeed cheating on his husband. He is interrupted by a young man who comes to deliver the drugs to him but refuses to leave without getting the money he’s owed. He had failed to make the earlier payments as well, because of which Devlin had given clear instructions to the delivery guy, Hector, to not return without the money. Therefore, Hector insists the client pay up, but he openly states that he does not have the money at the moment but can indirectly pay through sexual favors.

This act makes Hector tremendously uncomfortable. This might be satirizing the usual attitudes of heterosexual men, who are compelled to consider killing any man who might make a pass at them, instead of simply turning them down. Hector does exactly so, running the client over with his car and landing himself in trouble with the church. Only two people knew what had happened to Siegfried’s husband—Hector himself and the waiter at the club, who had already reported all of it to the police. Drew Devlin now naturally fears that the police will soon identify Hector as the killer and trace him back to the Four-Way Temple, which will surely bring an end to his illicit business. Therefore, he orders his henchman, Shuggie, to kill Hector and ensure that his secrets are buried.

While almost all the characters in Honey Don’t are quite superficial, just like in most of the pulp fiction detective novels that are the unofficial inspiration for the film, the male characters are especially shallow. They are perplexed by the changes of the modern world and too caught up in their testosterone-fueled personal missions to propagate certain political beliefs or undermine the choices of others. Mickie, a character who arrives later in the film and whose only significant contribution to the plot is that he beats up his girlfriend almost on a regular basis, has MAGA stickers all over his car. Hector comes off as an exception in some ways, as he still has some personal connection with a family member, his grandmother, unlike the rest of the men.

Thus, when Hector realizes that someone has broken into his house and killed his beloved grandmother, he is driven to seek revenge against the killer, and also the one who had ordered the hit. He quickly finds Shuggie and violently kills him before heading over to the church to kill Drew Devlin as well. However, the reverend is too quick for Hector’s reflexes, which are slowed down because of his injuries, and so Drew shoots Hector dead in an attempt to bury the secrets once and for all. 

Why does Reverend Drew Devlin have to die?

Reverend Drew Devlin is a colorful character who is most defined by his extremely sleazy nature and his very casual tendency to commit criminally and morally sinful acts at the drop of a hat. Despite being a godman and a preacher, who regularly guides his congregation about how to live their lives and advises them on how they should think and who they should support, he is an outright criminal who simply uses his church as a front to hide his vices. Firstly, Drew cannot contain his carnal desires whenever he sees any young and attractive woman, and has a predatory nature about him, which is mostly presented through dark comedy in the film. He uses the church to essentially get close to young women and then manipulate and groom them into establishing sexual relations with him on multiple instances. His desires know no bounds, which is clear from the fact that Drew agrees to meet with Honey as soon as he learns that she is attractive, despite the fact her entering the church could lead to a lot of trouble for him.

Along with his carnal desires, the reverend is driven by his greed for wealth, and so he casually runs a drug manufacturing and trading business, and the church is just a front to cover this illegal affair. It is through this business that he is related to a French cartel, who seemingly buys a lot of product from him, and is led by the mysterious woman seen at the very beginning of the film, named Cher. Although the exact nature of business between the two sides is not made clear, it is evident that the French control what Drew and his cartel do, and he acts upon the orders of his bosses. 

At the beginning of the film, Cher had rushed to the spot of the accident to remove the Four-Way Temple ring from Mia’s hand in order to ensure that no connection between her and the church was found. Cher works almost like a handler and an executioner, and therefore she is also the one to kill Reverend Drew after getting intimate with him for the very first and last time, upon the orders of her bosses. Drew had simply messed up the whole situation in the small town, as the police were now investigating the murders of Hector’s grandmother and Shuggie as well. Although they had not found Hector’s body, as he had been killed and disposed of inside the church, the two dead bodies would be enough to lead the police to the Four-Way Temple and to the French cartel through them. Therefore, the top bosses have Drew executed, although we do not actually see his dead body.

Who is the real killer?

For most of Honey Don’t, we are given the impression that Mia Novotny had been murdered by Drew and his men, which is actually not true. At the very end of the film, it is revealed that the real killer is Mary Grace Falcone, a local police officer who had also become Honey’s lover in recent times. MG, as she calls herself, has a secret past, which she keeps hidden from the world, and only reveals some of it to Honey eventually, sharing how she used to be beaten by her abusive father. At a young age, MG had utmost faith in God and the Church, as evident from her high school yearbook quote. However, it is quite likely that this faith in religion had been thrust upon her by her father, who was a typical conservative man.

Thus, when MG’s belief broke, because of the terrible torture at home and the realization that God was not coming to save her, it turned her extremely vengeful and violent. She started to despise women who gave in to the abusive people around them and turned to faith for respite, and developed extreme resentment against such people. Hiding her real instincts, MG grew up to become a police officer and look for such helpless women to prey on, whom she killed in the most gruesome manner as punishment for their foolish (according to her) choices in life. She reveals at the very end that she had murdered her own father and then gotten rid of his body. Finally, a series of other homicides, in which all the victims had been women, is also found to have been MG Falcone’s doing, meaning that she had actually been a vicious serial killer.

What had actually happened to Mia Novotny?

While Honey Don’t does not get into Mia Novotny’s death beyond a certain point, it seems to suggest that the woman had initially gone to Honey to tell her about the horrible atrocities going on inside the Four-Way Temple church. Mia must have been groomed, or at least approached, by the vile reverend too, following which she decided to hire the private detective to build a case against him. However, she had also secretly been targeted by MG, who saw her as a typical meek woman who had given in to the demands of the evil men around her. 

Before Mia could reveal anything significant to Honey, she had been killed by MG, as proven by the numerous stab wounds that were found to be the cause of her death in the post-mortem report. MG had then put Mia’s body into her car and rolled it down the hill to make it look like a car crash. Since Reverend Drew was guilty of having coerced Mia into sleeping with him, he quickly informed Cher about her death, and she then went to retrieve the Four-Way Temple ring to avoid any trouble for the church.

Did Honey rescue her niece?

A personal crisis arises for Honey when her niece, Corinne, goes missing one night, and nobody knows what has happened to her. Since Corinne had told Honey about how her boyfriend, Mickie, had been beating her on the very day of her disappearance, the protagonist believed that the young man must have had something to do with her going missing. It is also made to seem like an extremely creepy elderly man could have been linked to the disappearance, although it is later revealed that the man is actually Honey and her older sister Heidi’s good-for-nothing father, who wants to get back in his daughters’ lives, clearly for monetary purposes. Neither he nor Mickie have anything to do with the teenager’s disappearance.

In reality, MG had also been present at the scene when Corinne had spoken about her abusive boyfriend, and this information was enough for the serial killer to make the teenager her next target. When Corinne had run away from the bus stop after being creeped out by the man who turned out to be her grandfather, she had been abducted by MG, who must have been stalking her, and taken to her house, where she was kept hostage for all this time. Thus, when the final confrontation between MG and Honey takes place at the former’s house, Corinne is still alive and being kept hostage in the basement in a drugged state.

After learning the truth and guessing what must have happened to her niece, Honey fights MG and even gets stabbed in the process but ultimately shoots the villain dead. As Honey loses consciousness after the fight because of her injury and goes missing for a few hours, Heidi contacts her office and learns that she had gone to MG Falcone’s house. It is Heidi who then finds Honey at the house, and also her daughter, both of whom are rescued by the police. 

What does the last scene signify for Honey?

After recovering from her injuries, Honey O’Donahue is seen driving around town at the very end of  Honey Don’t, when she glances at a woman on a scooter standing right next to her at a signal stop. Honey is immediately impressed by the woman and starts flirting with her, seemingly unaware that the woman is actually Cher, the mass murderer working for (or maybe running) the French drug cartel. From the very beginning, Honey has actually been a bad detective with terrible instincts, especially when it came to her judging people. She had turned down potential clients like Mia and Mr. Siegfried, both of whose cases eventually became important to the central murder case. She had then started romancing MG Falcone, after having been swooned by her, without realizing that the woman was actually a murderer. 

Honey Don’t’s ending also suggests that Honey has a real habit of being attracted to dangerous and criminal women, meaning that her romantic life will always be hampered by her professional duties. She will possibly pursue Cher romantically now, and will be led to the French cartel, which she can be expected to bring down in the future. Given that the film does not follow the rosy standards of detective thrillers in most cases, it will be more likely that Honey will be killed by the powerful cartel once they find out about her. Lastly, we can also imagine that Honey is actually trying to get close to Cher, knowing very well who she is, as she had earlier seen the woman leave the church premises. Although Honey had not seen Cher’s face, she had definitely seen her distinctive red scooter, and so she might actually now be trying to befriend her in order to get to the French cartel. 

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