By Sara Bright.
Let’s be honest about the Golden Globes. It’s a dinner party. It’s a place where beautiful people in very expensive tuxedos pat each other on the back and agree that cinema is important. It is comfortable. It is safe.
Last week, they crowned Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. A great film, sure. A worthy winner. But while the champagne was flowing in Beverly Hills, there was a ghost at the feast. A film that was conspicuously absent from the nominations, from the discourse, from the polite conversation.
That film is Yes! (or Ken, in the original Hebrew), the latest from Israeli director Nadav Lapid.
It didn’t get a look in. And I’m not surprised. Because Yes! isn’t the kind of movie you watch with a glass of wine. It’s the kind of movie that grabs you by the lapels and screams in your face for two and a half hours. It premiered at Cannes – shunted into the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, presumably because the main competition found it too radioactive – and it has been leaving audiences shell-shocked ever since.
It’s a mess. It’s a chaotic, noisy, infuriating masterpiece. And in its refusal to offer easy answers or pick a comfortable side, it might just be the most honest film about the human condition to come out of the last two years.
The Artist at the End of the World
The premise sounds like a bad joke. A pianist named Y (just the letter, the smallest in the alphabet, the starting point of everything) is trying to survive. He wants to play classical sonatas. He wants art to be pure. But he has bills to pay.
So, he plays at parties.
He plays for the ultra-rich, the elite who are dancing on the edge of a volcano. He creates the soundtrack for a society that is trying desperately not to look out of the window.
And then he meets the Devil. Or rather, a Russian oligarch played by Aleksey Serebryakov.
Serebryakov is terrifying here. He isn’t a cartoon villain; he’s a force of nature. He represents the seduction of power. He offers Y the commission of a lifetime: to write the music for a new national anthem. But it’s not an anthem of unity; it’s an anthem of absolute, unthinking power.
This is the central friction of the film. It’s not really about geopolitics. It’s about the soul of the artist. Can you create beauty when the world around you is demanding propaganda? Can you say “No” when the check is big enough, or do you eventually just learn to say “Yes”?
A Fever Dream of the Present
Lapid doesn’t film this like a drama. He films it like a fever dream. The camera spins. The colours are neon-bright, almost sickly. The editing is aggressive. It feels less like a narrative and more like a panic attack set to a techno beat.
There are musical numbers. Actual musical numbers. The Chief of Staff sings Elvis. Y sings about his feelings while the horizon smokes. It’s grotesque, kitschy, and deeply uncomfortable.
But that’s the point. Lapid is diagnosing a collective psychological state. He’s looking at a society – any society in crisis – and showing us the coping mechanisms. The hedonism of the parties, the manic energy of the characters – it’s all a defense mechanism. If they stop dancing, they might have to process the trauma.
The film was written before the events of October 7th, but filming happened in their aftermath. Lapid reworked the script to weave the tragedy into the narrative. It gives the film a raw, unfinished quality. It feels like it was made in real-time, responding to the news cycle as it happened.
The View from the Hill
There is a scene that anchors the whole madness. The “Hill of Love.”
It’s a real place, apparently. A spot where people go to watch the conflict from a distance. In the film, it becomes a surreal theater box. Characters stand there, looking out at the smoke rising from Gaza, treating the reality of war as a spectacle.
It’s horrifying. But it’s also a mirror.
Lapid isn’t pointing fingers at one side or the other here. He’s pointing a finger at the human capacity to normalize horror. He’s asking how we compartmentalize. How do we live our lives, drink our coffee, and fall in love, while history is burning just over the hill?
This is why the film is politically difficult. It refuses to be a pamphlet. It doesn’t offer a clear “good guy” or “bad guy” in the way Hollywood likes. It portrays a society in a state of deep, traumatic shock, lashing out and turning inward simultaneously.
It portrays the “other” not as a monster, but as a haunting absence, or a smoke cloud on the horizon. And it portrays the “self” not as a hero, but as a confused, compromised mess.
The Silence of the West
It’s easy to see why the awards bodies ignored it. Yes! is too loud, too rude, and too specific. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
But the fact that it exists at all is a miracle. That Lapid managed to get funding, that he got a cast to agree to this script, that he finished it while the region was in flames – it’s an act of artistic defiance.
In the film, Y’s wife Yasmin calls him a clown. He insists he’s a pianist. By the end, you realize he’s neither. He’s a witness.
Yes! holds a mirror up to the concept of conformity. It asks us what happens when we agree to things we know are wrong, just to survive. It asks what happens to a culture when it demands total allegiance and leaves no room for the word “No.”
It won’t win an Oscar. It probably won’t even get a wide release in the multiplexes. It’s too prickly.
But years from now, when we look back at this period in history – at the confusion, the pain, the noise of it all – Yes! might be the only film that actually captured how it felt to live through it.
It isn’t a film about politics. It’s a film about the terrifying difficulty of remaining human when the world wants you to be a soldier.
It’s ugly. It’s loud. And you absolutely need to see it.
