Yes: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 6.1/10

Yes is a defiantly audacious provocation that swings for the fences and occasionally connects, though it mistakes shock value for depth too often to land as the masterpiece Lapid clearly intended. This is a film that will anger you, confuse you, and possibly make you question whether watching it was a mistake—which might actually be the point.

The plot (no spoilers)

Yes follows Y., a jazz musician, and his wife Yasmin, a dancer, who make a radical pact in the days after October 7: they’ll say yes to absolutely everything offered to them, regardless of moral consequence or personal dignity. What starts as an absurdist thought experiment becomes a genuinely grotesque descent into complicity as they prostitute themselves—literally and figuratively—to Israel’s political and military brass, eventually tasking Y. with composing a fascistic national anthem that redefines what art can be weaponized into.

The film operates in the register of bitter satire and sexual provocation, deliberately uncomfortable and unwilling to let you settle into voyeurism without guilt. Lapid’s work is essentially a philosophical blackmail note directed at Israeli society—and by extension, anyone comfortable with power structures that demand we surrender our humanity for survival or advancement. It’s a 152-minute dare that most audiences will find either brilliant or insufferable, with very little middle ground.

Acting & direction

Ariel Bronz carries the film with an almost deadpan resignation that makes his character’s moral freefall genuinely tragic rather than merely theatrical. Efrat Dor matches him beat-for-beat as Yasmin, and together they create a couple that feels like they’re slowly dissolving in real time—their chemistry becomes almost unbearable to watch as the script demands increasingly grotesque humiliations. The supporting cast, particularly Aleksey Serebryakov as a military figure, lend the film a documentary-like authenticity that makes the satire sting harder.

Lapid directs with relentless precision and no interest in mercy; scenes linger just long enough to make you squirm, and the editing cuts before punchlines land, creating a rhythm that feels deliberately antagonistic toward viewer comfort. The cinematography is clean and clinical, almost sterile, which somehow makes the grotesque sexual and political content feel even more obscene—there’s nowhere to hide in the frame. The score pulses underneath with a kind of ominous inevitability that never quite tips into melodrama.

The strengths

• The film refuses easy answers or moral comfort, treating its audience like intelligent adults capable of wrestling with genuinely difficult ideas about complicity, trauma, and societal corruption.
• Its core metaphor—that saying yes to everything is functionally identical to having no agency at all—is genuinely profound and works as both political satire and intimate character study.
• Ariel Bronz and Efrat Dor perform the impossible task of making systematic degradation feel like genuine character transformation rather than exploitation cinema.
• The film’s willingness to make its antagonists human rather than caricatures means the satire lands with actual weight instead of righteous posturing.

The weaknesses

• At 152 minutes, the movie occasionally disappears up its own thematic asshole, repeating the same observations about power and complicity without adding new dimensions or pushing the ideas further than the premise already takes them.
• Some sequences feel designed purely to provoke shock rather than serve the narrative, which undermines the film’s intellectual ambitions and makes it occasionally feel like an exercise in self-congratulation.
• The ending, while deliberately abrupt, doesn’t quite earn the full-stop finality it’s reaching for—there’s a sense that Lapid wanted to end on a gesture rather than a genuine conclusion.
• The film’s gender politics, particularly around Yasmin’s character, occasionally blur the line between satire and exploitation in ways that feel uncomfortably unexamined.

Who should watch it

This is essential viewing for cinephiles who admire politically engaged cinema and aren’t afraid of provocation—think Funny Games territory, where discomfort is the point rather than a side effect. If you loved dark comedies that weaponize satire like In the Loop or The Banshees of Inisherin, you’ll find something to chew on here, though Lapid’s work is considerably sharper and more punishing. Skip this if you’re seeking catharsis or moral reassurance—the film actively resists both.

Final verdict

Yes is a film that matters more than it works, though calling it a flat-out failure would be reductive. Nadav Lapid has created something genuinely radical about how power operates and how we become complicit through incrementalism and false choices, but the execution often prioritizes provocation over clarity and reaches for shock when it’s already made its point several times over. It’s worth watching if you’re willing to sit with profound discomfort and argue with a film that actively resists being liked—just don’t expect it to feel rewarding in any conventional sense. A 6.1/10 that deserves a higher rating for ambition but might deserve a lower one for patience-testing indulgence.