‘Yes’ Review: Nadav Lapid’s Furiously Orgiastic Satire of Modern Israel Asks How People Can Live Normally
David Ehrlich
Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. 2019’s eruptive “Synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris because he’s convinced that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similarly personal scream into the wind — this one rooted in the blue-balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate.
Spasming with anger where Lapid’s previous features (“Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) searched for hope, both of these movies were fringed with a sense of resignation that they fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his follow-up feature — written in Europe before the events of October 7, 2023, and then furiously reworked around them as Lapid conceded to the futility of escaping his background — would either be the wildest film that Lapid has ever made, or the most defeated.
The vituperative genius of his cinema is epitomized by the fact that “Yes” is both of those things at once. Extremely.
As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative “Yes” is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis. In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.
Here, in a movie about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather.
But “Yes” isn’t the simple polemic that might be implied by that description. Lapid isn’t much interested in making a clear political argument, and even less so in trying to convince any potential fence-sitters to fall on the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film that firmly believes Israel’s atrocities to be self-evident, and it’s only interested in exhausting itself for a viewership that already feels the same way. In one of the muttering stream-of-consciousness monologues that have become the default mode of communication for Lapid’s recent protagonists, pianist Y (Ariel Bronz) stops himself in the middle of a self-justifying hot streak to concede that “even the film’s audience hates Israel.”
Indeed, “Yes” is such a singularly vital addition to post-October 7 cinema because Lapid — sick of bashing his head against a wall in a hopeless attempt to change his own mind — knows that arguing against Israel is no longer enough to save anyone from it. Shadowed by the sense of ambivalence it shows towards its own value, “Yes” maintains that any movie worth making on this subject would have to do something bolder than just picking between the two sides of a massacre. And so it careens in the opposite direction with the same physical force that Lapid tends to pan his camera, reveling in the golem-like emptiness required to passively subscribe to a war until its characters are so debased by what that requires of them that they can hardly stand to look at each other without throwing up.
“Give up as early as possible,” Y plans to advise his infant son (born at midnight on October 8, 2023, and naively saddled with the name Noah). “Submission is happiness.” It’s a credo that he and his partner Jasmine (Efrat Dor) embody with fundamentalist devotion.
When some Israeli bigwigs invite the couple to sex up the house party that opens the film’s Sorrentino-like first chapter, they make such a frenzied spectacle of themselves that Y dies, comes back to life, and launches into a dance battle against the generals of the Israeli military while La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” blasts over the soundtrack. When a much older woman asks them to come back to a creepy mansion where the walls are decorated with the taxidermied heads of her own (living) relatives, Y and Jasmine ravenously tongue fuck her ears until she comes. They do every drug they’re offered, screw anyone who asks, and effectively “yes” their way into the highest levels of the Israeli war machine — all between dropping Noah off at daycare in the morning and picking him up at night.
At home, Y and Jasmine love each other with the same abandon as they thoughtlessly obey their overlords, and Lapid creates a domestic idyll so alive with manic feeling that I’m convinced he could be the next Casavettes if he weren’t so inescapably stuck being himself. They talk with their hands. They commit to a shared destiny. They wonder if Elon Musk would have sex with a woman as strong-willed as Jasmine, and altogether live in a blissful iron dome of denial, as if the only border on Earth was the one between the front door of their apartment and the rest of the world beyond it.
It’s a tamer but equally vibrant expression of the demented bacchanalia that Lapid creates around these characters whenever they go outside. What they see on the streets is only such a damning portrait of modern Israel because the realistic elements of its depiction (from the general air of blithe indifference, to the massive LED screen that stretches nationalist propaganda across six lanes of city highway) are tonally indistinguishable from the film’s more exaggerated flourishes, such as the war propagandist whose face is caked in yellow sand, and the Russian billionaire who can summon skyscrapers from the ground with a single button. There’s no use separating fact from farce in a film whose most grounded scene finds two people sucking face on the “Hill of Freedom” that overlooks the ruins of Gaza — pillars of fresh black smoke still rising in the distance as bomber jets rip through the sky. It’s “Zone of Interest” without the need for a garden wall.
Eventually, after an hour of the most irrepressibly exuberant filmmaking I’ve ever seen, that same Russian billionaire makes Y an offer that he can’t — and, per his custom, obviously won’t — refuse: Write the music for a bloodthirsty new rallying cry that will galvanize the Israeli people in their fight to erase Palestine from the map. An “anthem for the victory generation.” Even before Y becomes obsessed with the absurdly murderous lyrics that he’s assigned for the song, the whole project seems like such a farcical idea that we fear it might be rooted in fact (let’s just say the truth will be made all too clear by the end of the movie).
Y responds to the offer with an uncharacteristic show of hesitation, but the riches he’s offered as a reward prove too compelling to turn down; anything that might allow him to realize his dream of raising Noah in a nowhere country, with a non-existent language that only their family will know how to speak. As Y sees it, there are only two words that matter in the world to begin with: No. Yes. Any person who doesn’t say one of them is implicitly saying the other.
Struggling to shake the amorality of the assignment, Y dyes his hair blond and drives off into the desert for inspiration. And just like that, the party is over, as “Yes” starts to slow down as it distances itself from the carnivalesque egocentricity of life in Tel Aviv and moves closer to the atrocities on the other side of the Gazan border (a process that literally begins with Y slipping on a banana peel).
For much of its second act, the movie plays like a tug-of-war between the virtuosic dynamism of Lapid’s filmmaking and the sobering reality of the humanitarian crisis at hand. That tension is enriched by the irony of the fact that Y’s pathologically apolitical existence has led him straight into the clutches of right-wing power mongers (funny how that works), and it’s personified in the form of Y’s beady ex-girlfriend Leah (Naama Preis), who now pays the bills by running social media channels for the IDF.
In the queasiest scene of a film with no other kind, Leah spits out a horrifying rapid-fire monologue that details several of the most heinous crimes that Hamas committed on October 7, but her speech doesn’t “justify” Israel’s response or give Y the ammunition he needs to write an anthem on its behalf. On the contrary, it allows him to see Tel Aviv’s hedonism in a new light. Absent any coked up yacht parties to distract her from reality, committing the graphic details of those murders to memory is just Leah’s way of saying “yes” to what Israel is doing in her name. Y goes to the border in search of music, but the desert’s silence demands its own form of white noise.
From there, “Yes” continues to slow down even further until it almost comes to a complete stop. That you can feel Lapid so purposefully letting the air out of the tires doesn’t make the film’s disjointed third act feel like any less of a comedown from its first, but there’s a reckoning to be had as reality catches up with Y and quite literally forces him to face the music.
There’s obviously a moral dimension to that downshift, and it’s true that Bronz’s puppy dog eyes seem to grow a little sadder with each scene, but “Yes” never frames Y’s arc as a path from barbarity to righteousness. Or to quote the name of the song that Y is tasked with scoring: “From Destruction to Redemption.” It doesn’t extend any pity to its protagonist, or offer him real forgiveness for his collaboration either, but there’s a measure of understanding in its belief that so many artists are just a few benign yesses away from becoming a worm like Y — especially at a time when their art can feel so pointless and inconsequential in the face of the world’s cruelties.
To that point, the film’s uncertain ending suggests that Lapid doesn’t know where Y goes from here, or even could go from here — either morally or geographically. If he did, Lapid would probably be there already. But “Yes” isn’t searching for the “correct” response to Y’s dilemma so much as it’s using him to frame that dilemma for what it is. At one point, as the ghost of his dead, settler-hating mother rains rocks down on his body from heaven, disembodied narration invites us into the musician’s head: “Y thought of the hill on the border,” it says. “Of the non-stop explosions. Of the cloud of smoke enshrouding Gaza. The Israelis who grew up with the question ‘How could people live normally while perpetrating horror?’ have themselves become the answer.”
And yet, the ultimate power of this movie’s radically different paces and modes is found in how they combine to suggest that people can’t live normally while perpetrating horror — whether in Israel or anywhere else. The abiding strangeness Lapid packs into every minute of “Yes” is proof enough of that. And yet, in the dead-end surrender of his most feverish and ungovernable film so far, one abiding truth manages to tunnel out the bottom and come out the other side of Y’s story: If there is only so much to be gained from saying “yes,” then there is only so much to be lost from saying “no.”
Grade: A-
“Yes!” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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