‘Yes’ review: Nadav Lapid’s post-October 7 satire is loudly divisive

Dir: Nadav Lapid. France/Israel/Cyprus/Germany. 2025. 149mins

The October 7 attacks by Hamas, and Israel’s continuing campaign of retaliation in Gaza: most film-makers would consider these as topics to be tackled with the utmost seriousness and delicacy. But Israeli director Nadav Lapid is not one to deal in delicacy – although his approach is highly serious, in a bitterly comic way.

A full-on kamikaze approach to contemporary political satire

The director of 2021’s confrontational Ahed’s Knee (2021) and Berlin Golden Bear winner Synonyms (2019) returns with Yes, which takes a full-on kamikaze attitude to contemporary political satire. The result is bound to offend on a wide scale, but also exhilarate with its sheer rage and ebullient aggression. Not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not for fans of Israel’s political status quo, Yes promises to stir very heated debate.

The ‘Yes’ of the title is that of capitulation to a dominant order, as is the case with an Israeli couple named Yod, or ‘Y.’, (Ariel Bronz), a jazz musician and performer, and Yasmine (Efrat Dor), a dancer. Manifestly in the throes of an enduring amour fou, and with a baby son to raise, they earn a living performing deranged cabaret routines at parties for Israel’s wealthy, as the opening sequence establishes. Here Y. – played by Bronz as a charismatic but abject eternal nebbish – is the hapless clown in an extended routine of self-abasement. They also partake in sex work and are enlisted for a post-party threesome by a wealthy older woman (Idit Teperson), with absurdly amplified licking and slurping sound effects.

Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), a smoothie PR whose head surreally pixelates to reconstitute itself as a video screen, approaches Y. to compose the music for a national song for post-October 7 Israel: “an anthem for a new generation” commissioned by a billionaire (Alexei Serebryakov, from Leviathan and Anora). With the film’s muted colours and mood now contrasting starkly with the strident hues of the opening chapter, Y. heads to the border with Gaza in search of inspiration.

There he meets up with Lea (Naama Preis), his ex, and climbs the region’s so-called ‘Hill of Love’ to look out on the black smoke rising from a Gaza under constant bombardment. Here the film hits its most sobering note as Lea delivers a clear-eyed litany of some of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas – a bleakly arresting tour de force by Preis.

Perhaps the most shocking element of the film is the kitsch video that eventually accompanies Y’s anthem, with Israeli children singing cold-bloodedly vengeful lyrics – in fact, a genuine video for an actual song, with the children’s faces altered by AI.

A key to Lapid’s approach is provided by a glimpse of George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’, giving a clue to the register of satiric amplification that defines this film – one which often pushes the grotesque to extremes, (The opening section is entitled ‘The Good Life’, a nod to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita). Yes is liable to outrage people from many camps: among them supporters of Israel’s current actions; people who feel that both October 7 and its aftermath make levity unthinkable; and those who believe that, given the seriousness of the current situation in the Middle East, it might be considered trivial to protest the condition of the Israeli artist.

Lapid is undoubtedly aware of all these potential objections and, among other motivations, is surely making the film to engage with them. With his actors and artistic collaborators going full tilt – Shaï Goldman’s camera at points literally doing just that, veering and swooping kinetically – Lapid has made a film that is unapologetically in your face. Yes is not an easy film to like – and it clearly wasn’t made to be liked – but it’s certainly impossible to ignore.