After decades of celebrated filmmaking alongside his brother Joel, Ethan Coen is stepping into new creative territory with Go, Beavers!, the final film in his ambitious queer-themed B-movie trilogy. Following the release of his solo directorial debut Honey Don’t, which premiered at Cannes and screened in the festival’s midnight section, Coen now prepares to conclude the trilogy with this latest project, officially entering production.
Coen’s transition to solo work marks a notable departure from the style that made the Coen brothers a household name. Partnering with his wife and longtime editor Tricia Cook, Ethan has developed a series of films that fuse the aesthetics of classic exploitation cinema with contemporary queer storytelling. The trilogy, often described as a “lesbian B-movie” series, draws inspiration from cult genre films of the past but reinterprets them through a distinctively lesbian and queer lens.
The first two films in the trilogy have already been completed and screened, though they received mixed reactions from critics. Nonetheless, the team remains committed to their vision. Cook has confirmed that the script for Go, Beavers! is finished, and production has officially commenced on what promises to be a genre piece unlike any other. Ethan Coen describes the film as exploring themes of “women and god,” likening it to classics such as Deliverance and The Warriors, but reimagined with an all-female cast at the center.
The origins of this trilogy date back more than twenty years, with Coen and Cook nurturing the idea of reclaiming the B-movie genre from a queer perspective. Their goal is to subvert the traditionally male-dominated tropes of exploitation cinema by injecting a playful, sexy, and rebellious spirit through lesbian narratives. As Cook explained in a recent interview with The New Yorker, their approach is to “take back” this genre from the “straight male perspective” and reshape it to reflect queer experiences and aesthetics.
Ethan Coen’s solo films also reflect a stylistic shift, emphasizing absurdist and irreverent humor that contrasts with the more restrained and layered storytelling for which the Coen brothers are known. Meanwhile, Joel Coen is pursuing his own individual projects, with plans to begin shooting a new film this summer in Scotland. Fans hoping for a reunion of the iconic filmmaking duo will likely have to wait, as their last collaboration was the 2018 anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
With Go, Beavers!, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cook aim to push the boundaries of genre cinema and queer storytelling, crafting a bold and original conclusion to a trilogy that has long been in the making. The film is poised to offer audiences a fresh take on familiar themes, blending cult cinema influences with a modern, unapologetically queer perspective.
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