Margaret Qualley is saving sexless cinema

Last year’s smash horror hit “The Substance” was an exercise in excess. The film featured gnarly practical effects, outsized, absurdist humor and enough fake blood to fill a local water tower. But among all of the sequences designed to both titillate and nauseate viewers in Coralie Fargeat’s feature, about an aging celebrity who makes a Faustian deal to turn into a younger, perfect version of herself through the use of a black market drug, one stands out as the most jaw-dropping. A young woman named Sue, played with extraordinary bite by Margaret Qualley, steps onto the neon-saturated set of a popular television workout show and looks directly into the camera. “It’s time to pump it up,” Sue says. “Are you ready?” With a wink and a flick of her ponytail, Sue and six other dancers — all sporting shiny, one-piece leotards with gratuitous cutouts — begin to gyrate, thrust, and squat to throbbing electronic music. A camera’s aperture widens during filming to capture the full spectacle. Butts bounce with a youthful recoil while tight close-ups capture hands with hot pink painted fingernails slapping against taut thighs. And throughout all of the bulging bombast, Qualley maintains determined eye contact with the camera, reminding the audience that both the character and the actor playing her remain in complete control.

For Qualley, who describes being an introverted person in an extroverted business as a “look-at-me/don’t-look-at-me” fluctuation, this level of command presents a fascinating dissonance, allowing her to inhabit a range of characters that others can’t move between so convincingly. In a relatively short amount of time in the limelight, Qualley, a daughter of fellow actor Andie MacDowell, has stepped far from her mother’s shadow and repudiated claims of nepotistic privilege the old-fashioned way: with terrific, hard work. In the last five years alone, Qualley has worked with esteemed directors like Claire Denis, Richard Linklater and Yorgos Lanthimos, starred in a sleeper hit Netflix limited series and acted with her face rendered in a 3D model for Hideo Kojima’s expansive “Death Stranding” video games. And with each new project, Qualley has only refined the acumen of her already sharp talents.

But what’s most compelling about Qualley isn’t her alluring presence or her immediately recognizable tooth gap. Rather, it’s her ability to use these facets of her physical self as tools of her performance, features that lure the viewer into the palm of her hand. In her latest film, “Honey Don’t!,” Qualley plays small-town California detective Honey O’Donahue, a lesbian gumshoe hot on the trail of bad guys and good beaver. The film is the second in a planned trilogy of lesbian B-movie collaborations between Ethan Coen and his wife and screenwriting partner, Tricia Cooke, following last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” also starring Qualley. While intended to capture the sun-soaked sleaze of a B-movie noir, “Honey Don’t!” is a perplexingly plotted whodunit that delivers the “who” but none of the “why.”

Yet, Qualley’s exceptional style of onscreen sexuality is the perfect fit for a character like Honey, whose quippy, horny sleuthing doesn’t seem like such a far jump from a character like Sue, despite the vast chasm of quality between “The Substance” and “Honey Dont’!.” Qualley doesn’t use sexuality as a means of pure stimulation. Instead, she taps into her core autonomy, leveraging it to bring a human depth even to the most lascivious characters. Deftly walking the line between exploitation and control in “Honey Dont!,” Qualley authoritatively states that she’s in charge of how and when she’ll be desired, becoming a subversive screen siren for a new, all-too-prudish age.

Contrary to popular hand-wringing, it’s not just Gen Z that’s having less sex. Sure, 17-year-olds might be afraid of Sabrina Carpenter’s bawdy live performances, but data shows that sex and physical intimacy have been on the downturn for some time now. The cultural slant toward the puritanical is one reason that a cinematic sexuality like Qualley’s feels refreshing. In a time when the conventionally misogynistic idea of a woman sex symbol has become outmoded and appropriately problematic, Qualley’s presence boasts all of the bubbly effervescence of a Marilyn Monroe or, more recently, Pamela Anderson, without the queasy undercurrent of objectification. (Or, at least, she exists in a time when it’s possible to have more nuanced conversations about our patriarchal society’s desire to objectify.)

Qualley is a student of both those who came before her and her own mother, who so notably explored repression and desire in Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film, “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” In her own roles, Qualley snares the viewer with a physical conviction so bold and confident that it’s difficult to look at any other actor when she’s in the frame. Perhaps it’s that “look-at-me/don’t-look-at-me” dynamic that she employs that makes Qualley such a great contemporary temptress. Her craft provides the chance to become someone else, someone who isn’t just unafraid of being seen, but also delights in the opportunity to command another person’s gaze.

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Honey O’Donahue, though deserving of a better movie, might be Qualley’s best depiction of this sensation yet. Qualley plays the detective in a way that attracts the audience with all of the scuzz of a classic, shot-on-video B-movie. But this is all on Qualley’s terms. Her agency removes the film’s voyeuristic aspect, which would make for an exciting, fresh take on the B-movie genre if Coen and Cooke’s screenplay wasn’t so head-scratchingly muddled. But despite the film’s bewildering writing, Qualley’s performance — her first proper starring role in a studio film without a co-lead at the same billing — makes “Honey Dont!” a joy to watch, even when it’s downright agonizing. She has enough coarse charisma to float an entire franchise of Honey films, and that fast-talking, ribald sensuality is an integral part of what makes what would otherwise be a contemptible flop a decent way to spend an afternoon.

In the film, Qualley and her co-star, Aubrey Plaza, who plays a sapphic cop named MG who loves Honey’s “click-clackin’ heels,” frequently turn up the heat together. And because it’s Cooke’s screenplay, the sex avoids being pure arousal for the male gaze. When MG meets Honey at a local bar to give her a leg up in a case, MG also gives Honey something between her legs, too. An extended fingering scene, shot from the torso up while the two women discuss the difference between crochet and knitting, swaggers with fearlessness. Both Qualley and Plaza are totally game, and they both give and take in equal measure, basking in their characters’ pleasure rather than trying to woo the audience. Physical ecstasy is frequently offset with brutal violence, which Honey escapes with the same casual ease she uses to float into sexual encounters. An actor less aware of their own prowess would play Honey’s smoothness with a noticeable effort. Qualley, however, never has any trouble convincing us that she’s Honey, somewhere in her very core.

(Focus Features) Aubrey Plaza as MG Falcone and Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue in “Honey Don’t!”

Watching Qualley’s performance in “Honey Don’t!,” I was reminded of a passage of a book I recently scored on eBay while consumed in my twice-yearly Madonna rabbit hole, “Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations.” In the tome of essays, author and educator Patricia Pisters discusses Madonna’s ability to transcend the traditional objectification and victimization that famous women are usually subject to. As Pisters puts it, “Debilitating, constrictive gender roles and brutalizing violence can be overcome through hyper-conscious performances,” and Qualley’s work can be viewed the same way. In so many of her films, she is neither the object of desire nor the subject. Rather, Qualley is desire’s purveyor, selling it to the viewer and controlling just how much they get. Her demeanor while doing press for “Honey Don’t!” only affirms this further. She’s happy to chat candidly with Amy Poehler in the intro to a recent episode of Poehler’s podcast, but when saddled with lowball, ridiculous questions on a “Today Show” appearance, Qualley isn’t giving over any more than is necessary.

In that sense, Qualley is exhilaratingly unpredictable, a star who clearly cares more about the art she’s making than the fame it brings her. And maybe that’s because, when she’s working, she’s leaving it all on the floor, sometimes even literally. In Lanthimos’ 2023 triptych, “Kinds of Kindness,” Qualley wasn’t afraid to get nauseatingly weird or do a fully nude, four-way sex scene. And in the just-perverse-enough “Sanctuary” from the prior year, Qualley’s ruthless, wily dominatrix wavers between vulnerability and authority in the blink of an eye. How fitting, then, that the tagline for “Sanctuary” accurately describes Qualley’s style as a performer: “Her game. Her rules.”

A good actor can fit into just about any role, and a great actor can make every role they inhabit feel connected, no matter how disparate their latest role is from their last. And while “Honey Don’t!” may not play as well as something like “The Substance,” Qualley’s ability to establish a clear throughline between the characters is what makes her both a modern cinematic powerhouse and a screen siren throwback, updated for a new generation. While we might not know exactly what we’ll get whenever we show up to one of her movies, we can be sure that Qualley will keep us wrapped around her finger for as long as she’s onscreen. And though the character of Honey O’Donahue knows a thing or two about being wrapped around fingers, this lewd character wouldn’t be half as striking if it weren’t for Qualley’s full commitment to her obsession with the obscene.