Yes 2025 Movie Review Trailer Poster

 Horrified by the country of his birth and overwhelmed by the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has crafted the most wrathful filmography in modern cinema, battling his own Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his work. The explosive *Synonyms* (2019) was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris, convinced he was born in the Middle East by mistake; for its part, *Ahed’s Knee* (2021) constituted an equally personal cry into the wind—this time rooted in the frustrated impotence of artistic resistance in the face of an exultantly genocidal ethno-state.

While Lapid’s earlier features—*Policeman* and *The Kindergarten Teacher*—sought a glimmer of hope, these two films convulse with rage, though both are tinged by a sense of resignation that they fight tooth and nail to shake off. Consequently, I naturally assumed that his next feature—written in Europe prior to the events of October 7, 2023, and subsequently reworked with fury around them, once Lapid had accepted the futility of attempting to escape his origins—would be either the wildest film Lapid has ever made, or the most defeatist.

Director: Nadav Lapid
Writer: Nadav Lapid
Stars: Ariel Bronz, Efrat Dor, Naama Preis

The vituperative genius of his cinema is perfectly embodied by the fact that *Yes* is, simultaneously, both things at once. And it is so to an extreme degree.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative *Yes* constitutes a veritable orgy of surrender and self-loathing that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director—shot by shot. In a film that unfolds as a hybrid—under the influence of ecstasy—between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom* and Jim Carrey’s comedy *Yes Man*, Lapid doubles down on the frenetic violence of his cinematic style, while fully embracing his growing appetite for submission. 

Here, in a film about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife—who manage to afford the life of their newborn by acceding to every demand that Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class imposes upon their talents and their bodies—Lapid does not rail against the worst monstrosity of the modern era by standing up to power, but rather by voluntarily offering up his characters to be crushed beneath the heel of its boot. And then—with a literalness that no one else would dare employ—by forcing them to lick that boot until it is so clean that the entire world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather.

But "Yes" is not the simple polemic that such a description might suggest. Lapid is not particularly interested in formulating a clear political argument, and even less so in attempting to convince potential fence-sitters to side with the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film that firmly believes Israel’s atrocities are self-evident, and is interested only in consuming itself before an audience that already shares that very opinion. In one of those murmured "stream-of-consciousness" monologues—which have become the habitual mode of communication for Lapid’s recent protagonists—the pianist Y (Ariel Bronz) pauses mid-spate of self-justification to admit that "even the film’s audience hates Israel." Indeed, *Yes* constitutes a singularly vital contribution to post–October 7th cinema, for Lapid—fed up with banging his head against a wall in a desperate attempt to change his own mindset—knows that arguing against Israel is no longer enough to save anyone from its clutches. 

Burdened by the sense of ambivalence it displays toward its own worth, *Yes* posits that any film worth making on this subject ought to do something bolder than merely choose between the two sides of a massacre. And so, it hurtles in the opposite direction with the same physical force with which Lapid typically moves his camera, reveling in the—golem-like—emptiness demanded by the passive endorsement of war; a process that degrades his characters to such an extent that they can barely bear to look at one another without feeling nauseous. 

Horrified by the country of his birth and overwhelmed by the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has forged the most splenetic filmography in contemporary cinema, battling his own Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his work. The eruptive *Synonyms* (2019) constituted a semi-autobiographical identity crisis centered on a man who flees to Paris, convinced he was born in the Middle East by mistake; for its part, *Ahed’s Knee* (2021) served as an equally personal cry into the wind—in this instance, rooted in the frustrated impotence of artistic resistance in the face of an exultantly genocidal ethno-state.

"Surrender as soon as possible," Y plans to advise his young son (born at midnight on October 8, 2023, and—with naive cruelty—christened Noah). "Submission is happiness." It is a creed that he and his partner, Jasmine (Efrat Dor), embody with an almost fundamentalist devotion.

When some Israeli bigwigs invite the couple to spice up—with a sexual twist—the house party that kicks off the film’s first chapter (a sequence of undeniable Sorrentino-esque flair), they put on such a frenzied spectacle that Y dies, comes back to life, and gets locked in a dance-off against Israeli army generals—all while La Bouche’s "Be My Lover" thunders on the soundtrack. When a much older woman asks them to accompany her to an unsettling mansion—its walls adorned with the taxidermied heads of her own (still-living) relatives—Y and Jasmine voraciously lick her ears until she reaches orgasm. They consume whatever drugs are offered to them, sleep with anyone who asks, and, in practice, say "yes" their way up to the highest echelons of the Israeli war machine—doing it 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 unbridled abandon with which they unthinkingly obey their superiors; Lapid constructs a domestic idyll so vibrant—and so charged with manic intensity—that I am convinced he could be the next Cassavetes, were he not so irredeemably trapped in being himself. They speak with their hands. They surrender to a shared destiny. They wonder if Elon Musk would ever sleep with a woman of such unyielding character as Jasmine, and, ultimately, they live beneath a blissful "Iron Dome" of denial—as if the only border existing on Earth were the one separating their apartment door from the rest of the world stretching out beyond it.

It is a more restrained—though equally vibrant—expression of the frenzied bacchanal that Lapid orchestrates around these characters whenever they set foot outside their home. What they witness on the streets constitutes such a damning portrait of modern Israel precisely because the realistic elements of its depiction (from the general air of blithe indifference to the massive LED screen broadcasting nationalist propaganda across six lanes of an urban highway) prove tonally indistinguishable from the film’s most exaggerated flourishes—such as the war propagandist with his face caked in yellow sand, or the Russian billionaire capable of making skyscrapers sprout from the ground with the mere push of a button. It is futile to attempt to separate reality from farce in a film whose most grounded scene depicts two people kissing passionately atop "Freedom Hill," overlooking the ruins of Gaza, while fresh plumes of black smoke still rise in the distance and bomber jets streak across the sky at full speed. It is *The Zone of Interest*, but without the need for a garden wall.

Finally, after an hour of the most irrepressibly exuberant cinematic style I have ever witnessed, that same Russian billionaire makes Y an offer he cannot—and, true to form, obviously will not—refuse: to compose the score for a new, bloodthirsty battle cry intended to galvanize the Israeli people in their struggle to wipe Palestine off the map. A "hymn for the victory generation." Even before Y becomes obsessed with the absurdly homicidal lyric assigned to him for the song, the entire project seems like such a grotesque concept that we fear it might, in reality, be rooted in reality (suffice it to say that the truth will become crystal clear by the film's end).

Y responds to the offer with a flicker of hesitation—unusual for him; however, the riches offered as a reward prove too tempting to refuse: anything that might allow him to realize his dream of raising Noah in a non-existent country, speaking a fictional language that only his family would know. In Y’s view, only two words truly matter in the world to begin with: No. Yes. Anyone who does not utter one of them is, implicitly, saying the other.

Struggling to shake off the amorality of the commission, Y dyes his hair blond and ventures into the desert in search of inspiration. And just like that, the party is over; the film begins to slow its pace as it distances itself from the carnivalesque egocentrism of life in Tel Aviv and draws closer to the atrocities unfolding just across the border in Gaza.

Throughout much of its second act, the film unfolds as a tug-of-war between the virtuoso dynamism of Lapid’s mise-en-scène and the stark reality of the humanitarian crisis.

Watch Yes 2025 Movie Trailer