Oklahoma Honey: Pure cinematic pleasure (review)

McConaughey resurrected as Oklahoma beekeeper-musician; a southern tale that turns into a bloody thriller: Andrew Patterson creates a crazy object that can be listened to like a sublime country album.

This is a film full of mind-blowing, truly unforgettable sequences. But there is a plan, around Oklahoma Honey, that stays in mind for a long time. Hundreds of bees land on Matthew McConaughey’s bare arm, forming a living glove that swarms up to the top of his elbow. The actor smiles, calmly. We wonder how they were able to film that, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter: the shot says the essential. Beekeeper, mandolin player, owner of the best honey farm in the county and leader of a bluegrass group made up of magnificent broken arms, Amziah King reigns, debonair, over a piece of Oklahoma bush. McConaughey, who had not toured for six years, lends him his magnificent redneck nonchalance and this drawling phrasing that seems invented for improvised sermons around a potluck. We had forgotten how much we missed him, and especially how great this guy could be.

But the film is first and foremost that of Andrew Patterson. This director who came out of nowhere surprised his world in 2020 with The Vast of Night, a little sci-fi thing marked by a mind-boggling sequence shot that crossed an entire sleeping city. So here is this filmmaker again, broader, crazier, and with a story that is impossible to put into a box. Rustic musical comedy? Southern fable? Malickian thriller? Perhaps the best way to approach this Oklahoma Honey is to forget the word “story” and look at it like you listen to a great country album. All this indeed resembles those records which float from one song to another, each piece spinning its own story – sometimes radiant, sometimes heartbreaking – without ever losing its overall tone. In fact, Patterson doesn’t tell a plot, he composes a tracklist.
The first beaches are like a solar melodrama. When Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, a revelation of maddening accuracy) resurfaces, a young girl he had taken in as a child before losing sight of her, the old king introduces her to honey and the community, to bees and the unsaid, in a succession of scenes bathed in a stunning golden light. There are a few stories that punctuate his daily life, but the main thing is the community: we jam in the kitchen, we dine with neighbors, we learn to sing together.

And Patterson films what almost no one knows how to film: the raw joy of being together, the intoxication of ordinary people. Then the album changes face. Hives are stolen, and suddenly the bucolic tale mutates into a revenge thriller, Kateri taking up the torch from her mentor and having to face a gallery of bastards including a rejoicing Kurt Russell. The songs darken, the tempo picks up, but we stay in the same vein: a tale from the South where each incident is one of those stories that we embellish at night until the lie becomes truer than reality. Stealing hives? No question of a simple pick-up: you will have to cross a forest, build a raft and go down an impassable river. Everything here overflows and turns into legend.

The feeling when faced with this totally incredible object is that of pure discovery. The sensation of seeing a filmmaker take insane risks, marrying banjo and blood, the gentleness of bees and the fury of men, without ever losing sight of his story or the pleasure of pure cinema. Oklahoma Honey is not afraid of anything: neither ridicule, nor emotion, nor scale. We come out a little groggy, honey still dripping from our fingers, with the heady tune of a refrain that we can no longer get out of our heads.

By Andrew Patterson. With Matthew McConaughey, Angelina Lookingglass, Kurt Russell… Duration: 2h10. Released August 19, 2026