Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. 2019’s eruptive “Synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris because he’s convinced that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similarly personal scream into the wind — this one rooted in the blue-balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate.

Spasming with anger where Lapid’s previous features (“Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) searched for hope, both of these movies were fringed with a sense of resignation that they fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his follow-up feature — written in Europe before the events of October 7, 2023, and then furiously reworked around them as Lapid conceded to the futility of escaping his background — would either be the wildest film that Lapid has ever made, or the most defeated.

The vituperative genius of his cinema is epitomized by the fact that “Yes” is both of those things at once. Extremely.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative “Yes” is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis. In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.

Here, in a movie about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather.

But “Yes” isn’t the simple polemic that might be implied by that description. Lapid isn’t much interested in making a clear political argument, and even less so in trying to convince any potential fence-sitters to fall on the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film that firmly believes Israel’s atrocities to be self-evident, and it’s only interested in exhausting itself for a viewership that already feels the same way. In one of the muttering stream-of-consciousness monologues that have become the default mode of communication for Lapid’s recent protagonists, pianist Y (Ariel Bronz) stops himself in the middle of a self-justifying hot streak to concede that “even the film’s audience hates Israel.”

Indeed, “Yes” is such a singularly vital addition to post-October 7 cinema because Lapid — sick of bashing his head against a wall in a hopeless attempt to change his own mind — knows that arguing against Israel is no longer enough to save anyone from it. Shadowed by the sense of ambivalence it shows towards its own value, “Yes” maintains that any movie worth making on this subject would have to do something bolder than just picking between the two sides of a massacre. And so it careens in the opposite direction with the same physical force that Lapid tends to pan his camera, reveling in the golem-like emptiness required to ively subscribe to a war until its characters are so debased by what that requires of them that they can hardly stand to look at each other without throwing up.

~this review continues on IndieWire~