Horrified by his native land 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; *Ahed’s Knee* (2021), for its part, constituted a cry into the wind—equally personal, yet rooted in the frustrated impotence of artistic resistance in the face of an exultantly genocidal ethno-state.
This review was originally published during the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Kino Lorber will release *Yes* in theaters starting Friday, March 27, 2026.
Horrified by his native land 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; *Ahed’s Knee* (2021), for its part, constituted a cry into the wind—equally personal, yet 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 hope, these two subsequent films writhe with rage, both tinged by a sense of resignation that they fought tooth and nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his next feature film—written in Europe before 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. The vituperative genius of his cinema is encapsulated in the fact that *Yes* is, simultaneously, both. And it is so to an extreme degree.
As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative *Yes* is 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 like a cross—while under the influence of ecstasy—between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom* and the Jim Carrey 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 secure a livelihood for their newborn by acceding to each and every demand that Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class imposes upon their talents and their bodies—Lapid does not rail against the most abject monstrosities of the modern era by standing up to power, but rather by voluntarily offering up his characters to be crushed beneath the sole of its boot. And, immediately thereafter—with a literalism that no other filmmaker would dare employ—he compels them to lick that boot until it is so spotless that the entire world can see, reflected in its leather, the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes.
However, *Yes* is not the simple diatribe that the preceding description might suggest. Lapid isn’t particularly interested in articulating an explicit political argument—much less in trying to convince undecided viewers to take a stand on the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film grounded in the firm conviction that Israel’s atrocities are self-evident facts; its sole interest lies in consuming itself entirely before an audience that already shares that very perception. In one of those murmured monologues—veritable streams of consciousness that have become the protagonists’ habitual mode of communication in Lapid’s recent work—the pianist Y (played by Ariel Bronz) pauses mid-spate of self-justification to admit that "even the audience for this film hates Israel."
Horrified by his native land and overwhelmed by the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has crafted the most splenetic 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 fru
"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 as strong-willed 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 his 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: 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 throttle. 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 itself (suffice it to say that the truth will become crystal clear by the end of the film).
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 fails to utter one of them is, implicitly, saying the other.
Struggling to shake off the amorality of the assignment, Y dyes his hair blond and ventures into the desert in search of inspiration. And just like that, the party is over; the film *Yes* begins to slow its pace as it distances itself from the carnivalesque self-absorption of life in Tel Aviv and draws closer to the atrocities unfolding just across the border in Gaza (a transition that, quite literally, kicks off with Y slipping on a banana peel).
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