Yes
Quality
Political
Satire
Provocative
DivisiveThe review
This is a maximalist, physically relentless satire that critics largely agree announces itself as major, confrontational filmmaking — a whirling camera, saturated color, and a score of blaring music and noise are used to put the audience inside a state of moral numbness rather than simply depict it. The central performances, especially the lead as a musician sliding into complicity, are consistently singled out as fearless.
The same maximalism divides opinion. Several critics find the film's fury exhilarating and precisely controlled, a rare case of formal excess matching its subject; others find it hectoring, repetitive, and so blunt in its point-making that it forecloses ambiguity a subtler film might have used to greater effect. There's a recurring sense that the film says what it means early and then keeps saying it for the rest of its long runtime.
Thematically, most reviewers converge on the same territory: complicity, the seduction of nationalism, and how easily moral compromise gets absorbed into ordinary daily life and even packaged as celebration. Where critics split is less about whether the target is worth aiming at than about whether the film's confrontational, sensorial approach illuminates that target or just overwhelms it — some read the excess as the whole point, others as a substitute for the harder work of persuasion.
Who it's for
Viewers drawn to confrontational, formally audacious political cinema — the kind that assaults the senses on purpose — and who want a film willing to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it neatly. Fans of directors who use camera movement and sound as instruments of argument, and audiences interested in Israeli society's reckoning with itself in the wake of recent conflict, will find this exactly the kind of urgent, unfiltered filmmaking they're looking for.
Who it's not for
Viewers who prefer restraint, ambiguity, or a gentler hand with difficult political material will likely find the film's approach exhausting rather than illuminating. Anyone sensitive to graphic content delivered without much narrative cushioning, or looking for a balanced multi-perspective treatment of its real-world subject matter, should expect the film to offer neither. — graphic sexual content · nudity · intense violence · substance use · heavy/bleak themes · strong language · flashing lights/strobing
Birds of a feather...
- FilmThe Battle of Algiers (1966)
Both stage complicity as visceral confrontation, saturating the viewer in the society they indict and refusing any clean moral exit; discomfort functions as a political method in each.
75% - FilmA Separation (2011)
A musician is drawn into an artistic commission that implicates him in national violence, and the film tracks how complicity gets normalized through pleasure, routine, and self-deception. Like A Separation, it forces the protagonist and the viewer to sit inside an impossible moral position with no clean exit, and its ending refuses redemption or damnation. Though stylistically maximalist, the ethical knot is very similar.
75% - FilmAll That's Left of You (2026)
Both films confront national mythology and cyclical political violence in Israel/Palestine, refusing catharsis and using formal structure to implicate the audience in inherited complicity.
68% - FilmKontinental '25 (2025)
Like Yes, this is a formally aggressive, dialogue-driven interrogation of how societies rationalize moral surrender, refusing the audience a clean verdict.
65% - FilmFiume o morte! (2025)
Both use maximalist, communal, deliberately unsubtle formal strategies to stage nationalist spectacle and complicity as something disturbingly performable and repeatable by ordinary people.
60% - FilmMr. Nobody Against Putin (2025)
Shares Yes's central preoccupation with complicity-as-authorship, showing how ordinary people participate in state propaganda while never fully resolving their own moral compromise.
60% - FilmFjord (2026)
Shares Yes's interest in institutions and cultural clashes that normalize moral ambiguity, withholding resolution to keep the audience implicated rather than reassured.
58% - FilmThe President's Cake (2025)
Both films stage complicity with state power through visceral, embodied ritual (a commissioned anthem, a mandatory cake) that implicates ordinary people in nationalist spectacle.
55% - FilmGoodfellas (1990)
Both use immersive, sensorial style (whirling camera, hedonistic excess) to make moral rot feel like lived experience rather than argued thesis, refusing tidy comeuppance.
50%