The satirical Yes! captures the grotesque revelry of the Israeli regime

In between nights of heady revelry, the two protagonists pick up their baby Noah from daycare. Yet it’s in his company that the chaos they claim to only associate with, clearly lingers within, ruling their lives. Early on the couple try to sit quietly. “Let’s listen to the silence,” Yasmin suggests as she cuddles their sleeping son. Gradually, though, the grating and scraping sounds of the outside world infringes, driving them into a furor of flying limbs, dancing manically from room to room.

Lapid refuses to let these characters settle long enough to explain their psyches, but the pace of their scenes captures two people on the knife’s edge, balanced precariously between sanity and violence. When Y goes to the park, sitting opposite an outdoor gym, he focuses on a man leaping across two metal poles, muscles straining to find purchase with every jump. Only seconds later, Y opens his phone to the report of the Israeli army murdering more innocent people in Gaza, paired with the army’s official statement on reducing “civilian casualties.” “I believe the army,” he says, eyes steadily trained on the gym-goers. Yasmin and Y are products of their country, coming apart at the seams in a sequence of ear-splitting rips, and subsequently unable to acknowledge the tatters they parade as a result. 

Yes! ramps up after a Yom Ha’atzmaut party, culminating on an anonymous-looking rooftop. It’s there that Y meets a government official who commissions him to write a new national anthem, testing his shallow moral resolve (represented by the voiceover reminding us of his mother’s disdain for her country’s violence). But Y never considers turning down the offer, and the scale of his grotesque denial is embodied late in the film by a steady shot of Gaza, trails of smoke stretching into the sky in the wake of Israeli bombing. In the background we hear Y kissing and murmuring to his old friend Leah (Naama Preis), deliberately positioned away from the site of violence, unwittingly enabling it through their ignorance. 

Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book, a fictionalized rendering of Pier Paolo Pasolini making his 1975 film Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom, reflects on the purpose of filmmaking amidst fascism. “If it’s hard to watch, how much harder to live. Make the film, he thinks to himself. Make it like an exorcism. Then let’s see where we are.” That line hangs over Yes!, a film that could only be made by someone in the throes of an internal reckoning. Lapid’s garish maximalism will surely isolate some filmgoers, but the satire of Yes! Works best when it’s fearless—unbothered by the genocidal regime it captures.

Director: Nadav Lapid
Writer: Nadav Lapid
Starring: Ariel Bronz, Efrat Dor, Naama Preis, Aleksei Serebryakov, Sharon Alexander
Release Date: March 27, 2026