Fantasies take many forms, including ones closely based on reality. An example is “Yes,” the Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s furious and grotesque satire of Israeli life—or, properly speaking, the lives of Jewish Israelis—in the wake of the October 7th attacks. Lapid’s frenzied and disgusted vision emerges as he follows the fortunes of a young Tel Aviv couple—a jazz pianist known only as Y (Ariel Bronz), pronounced “yud,” and a dancer named Yasmine (Efrat Dor). At the start of the movie, little suggests their artistic background: they’re working as sexy disco clowns at a big outdoor party for the rich and the politically connected. Yasmine bops from guest to guest, flinging her arms around them and planting kisses on their lips, while Y crawls around, sucks on a dildo, stands up and pounds an electric keyboard, and gets his head dunked in gooey vats of pink and green goo. He feigns drowning, Yasmine strips to a bikini to save him, and he spits up an orange Ping-Pong ball. Then the couple find themselves facing off against an I.D.F. commander (Rodia Kozlovski) in a so-called song battle: the officer roars “Love Me Tender” while Y goes nuts to the Eurodance hit “Be My Lover.” The party’s decadent chaos gets its meaning nailed to the screen at the end of the scene, with a glimpse of an art book showing George Grosz’s satirical 1926 painting “Pillars of Society”—a repulsive mockery of Weimar Germany’s militaristic bourgeoisie.

But where Grosz targets only the vain and prosperous, Lapid puts his struggling bohemians at the heart of corruption. The party concludes with sex work—Y and Yasmine go home with a rich, middle-aged woman and service her with their tongues in her ears. Delighted with the results, the woman invites them to a gathering on a yacht to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. There, Y runs into an acquaintance named Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), now cynically working as an Army P.R. rep, who connects him with a Russian Jewish oligarch (Aleksey Serebryakov). The oligarch offers Y a lucrative job: setting to music “an anthem for the victory generation,” a bloodthirsty text celebrating Israel’s war on Gaza. (Sample lyrics: “Destroy, destroy. . . . Exterminate. . . . There will be nothing left.”) Y takes the job and, as he immediately foresees, loses his soul.

Yasmine and Y live in a modest but airy apartment with their infant son, Noah, whom they adoringly sing to and dance with. This playful and bouncy family dynamic is, oddly, at the center of “Yes,” in that Y’s dramatic pivot to active complicity with ideas and actions that he finds repugnant arises from an impulse that is both philosophical and paternal. In a meandering monologue, he outlines a cynical, speculative paradox that mixes vague autobiographical memories with despair at the idea of his baby boy growing up in an Israel that seems to have no future. Recalling that his adolescent rebellion took the form of a thunderous “no,” Y now thinks that the more courageous form of revolt is to say “yes.” He teaches Noah that those are the only two words in the world, that the Mediterranean seductions of Israeli life (weather, sea, agriculture) are irresistible, and that there’s nothing to do but submit. “Submission is happiness,” Y tells his son, and attempts to demonstrate the truth of this by accepting the anthem commission in willful defiance of his own values.

Those humanistic and critical values are, for Y, not merely some abstract doctrine but a vital aspect of his identity. They are the ideals of his late mother, with whom he was very close and whose voice echoes in his head throughout, as he recalls her stern judgments of Israel’s policies and her resistance to its militarism. When he was a young music-conservatory student, she urged him to join an Army band in order to avoid active military service—telling him, approximately, “Let the neighbor’s child get killed.” Furthermore, Y’s grief over his mother’s death turns out to have been a crucial factor in bringing him and Yasmine together. He fears what his mother would say about his choice: he imagines her unleashing a storm of rocks upon him from the sky; when the Independence Day yacht almost capsizes, he sees evidence of her supernatural reproach. But none of this stops him from plunging into his own moral and political degradation, capitulating to the moral nullity that he sees all around him in public displays of patriotic pomp and in quiet private avowals of bloodlust.

Y shouldn’t need a judgment from the beyond to show him the way; if his eyes and ears were open, he’d find a moral compass at home. When he exultantly tells Yasmine about his commission and shows her the text he is to set, she is calmly but unambiguously dubious. Yet his enthusiasm runs roughshod over any doubt, and it’s hardly a spoiler to say that his decision imperils his marriage. In his turmoil, he reconnects with a former partner, a woman named Lea (Naama Preis), to whom he bares his soul before it’s gone. In this way, Lapid keeps the emotional aspect of Y’s self-defilement at the forefront of the drama. And inextricable from this personal crisis is a crisis of a different sort: whether it’s bearable to live in Israel and transmit to one’s child an Israeli identity. The drama gives the question of emigration a radical twist: could effacing one’s own past free the next generation from compromise and complicity?

When discussing “Yes,” it’s irresistible to go into extensive detail, because Lapid keeps the movie whirling at a vertiginous pace, packing the screen with action and the soundtrack with talk, music, and noise. He uses the camera mimetically, jerking and gyrating and plunging and dashing to keep up with all the physical activity and hectic states of mind. The two main characters are relentlessly perky, and everyone they meet seems to burst with energy and purpose, expressing themselves in dialogue that’s by turns confrontational, confessional, exuberant, agonized, ribald, and sententious. The pace of observation is furious, and even simple plot points are crosshatched with micro-incidents, asides, and gestures that overflow the boundaries of a screenplay and spill out into life at large.

That delirious excess befits the essence of Lapid’s method, which is a fusion of fiction with indigestibly and irreducibly nonfictional elements. That method was also evident in his previous feature, “Ahed’s Knee” (2021), in which a filmmaker (likewise referred to as Y) confronts censorship in Israel’s cultural bureaucracy while contending with his mother’s grave illness. (The next film Y is planning, meanwhile, is about a real-life incident: a young Palestinian woman’s act of protest and an Israeli official’s statement that he wishes she’d been shot.) And Lapid’s preceding movie, “Synonyms” (2019), was about a young man named Yoav—starts with “Y”—who, intending to shed his Israeli identity, moves to Paris, which is where Lapid now lives. By comparison with these films, Lapid’s approach to both fantasy and nonfiction in “Yes” is far freer. Much that’s memorable in the new movie is nonfictional in an ordinary, baseline, yet therefore all the more startling way. Biking in the city, Y passes through a tunnel adorned with an enormous Israeli flag; walking at night, he’s in the presence of a crowd that’s exulting to a band’s performance, streamed on an enormous screen, of a patriotic song. Travelling from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea in search of meditative solitude, Y passes a wall that divides Israeli from Palestinian territory, goes through a checkpoint, drives on a road for (he says) Jewish drivers only, and passes a prison where, he says, a thousand Palestinian people are being held captive.

The very core of the movie—the song that Y is to set—likewise bears the crucial stamp of nonfiction. In a prologue and an epilogue, Lapid emphasizes that it’s a found object, based on a 1947 song that, after the October 7th attacks, was “distorted” into a rant of hate and vengeance; lest we doubt this, he includes an actual published video of children singing the song. The use of a prologue is noteworthy, and similar to the way that Lapid began “Ahed’s Knee” with news accounts of the incidents on which that movie was based. The fictions of both films are factually contextualized from the start. But “Yes” differs from “Ahed’s Knee” in that it also contains a sort of documentary, one that’s integrated more tangibly into the drama and, for that reason, less responsibly.

Y calls Lea, his ex, who drives over to pick him up near the Dead Sea. After a meal at a hotel, he urges her to go west, to the border with Gaza. There, they get advice from a soldier, who tells them where they can get a clear view of the Israeli strikes—a place appallingly called the Hill of Love. Y climbs it and looks out, seeing large clouds of smoke rise while gunfire and explosions resound in the distance; it’s death in real time. The inclusion of such a scene with a fictional character standing before it is a breach of decency that reflects the general limits of “Yes”: the limits of form. The moment demands, instead, that people stand there and speak in their own names—whether the actor Bronz, breaking character, or Lapid himself, breaking the narrative context, or both, in order to enfold in the very form of the movie the enormity, the incommensurability, of the documentary reality.

Incorporating the real-life war in the movie’s fictional setting brought to mind another recent film about Israel’s war on Gaza, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” by the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, in which an actual recording of a child from Gaza who was trapped in a car under siege by Israeli forces is integrated into a dramatization of representatives at Palestine’s emergency-services offices who spoke with her and recorded the call. In both films, the effect is of a diminution, a depersonalization—not to say, a desecration of the experience of horror that the documentary element embodies. (My colleague Justin Chang, reviewing Ben Hania’s film, criticized its “roughshod mistreatment of primary material.”)

It’s all the more striking, in “Yes,” because Lapid also constructs a brilliant, moving, and thoughtful scene by which to approach the horrors endured by Israelis during the October 7th attacks. Lea, it turns out, became an official Army propagandist after the attacks, and her duties involve issuing, to international media, accounts of the atrocities that were inflicted on Israeli victims. At Y’s insistence, she tells him about them as they drive. The scene is all talking, much of it of Lea in closeup, and it’s written and performed with wide-ranging awareness and complex motives and emotions. The litany of horrors is also a horror of litanies: the authentic pain of the victims is both contained and debased in the propagandistic digest, in the professional way in which it is dispensed—along with Lea’s self-questioning about her role in disseminating it. Here, Lapid achieves a remarkable balance: Lea’s monologue about realities and representations simultaneously dignifies traumatic experience and critiques the packaging of trauma. And yet, in the scene on the Hill of Love, Lapid offers no self-questioning, no sense of cinematic exertion or trouble, in the fictional framing of the real agonies of Gaza.

The film’s failures of form fall on both sides of the fiction and nonfiction divide. “Yes” is a daring, angry, anguished rant that feels first person in every aspect except the cinematic one; it must have taken ropes to keep Lapid from leaping out of the director’s chair and popping up in front of the camera. If so, I wish he’d followed his impulses—and that he’d granted his actors a similar freedom to speak in their own names, too. The fiction of “Yes” is so intense, so persuasive, so affecting that metafictional breaches in the fourth wall would not have risked diminishing its power. The delineation of Y’s relationships with Yasmine and Lea—the wife, free-spirited and hedonistic yet clear and decisive, and the ex, personally compromised but far more morally probing—suggests a novelistic insight. (The enduring melancholy of the exes’ long-ago breakup emerges in the movie’s most freely joyful scene: a spontaneous, comedic duet at a hotel-restaurant piano.) On the other hand, Lapid is so intent on expressing himself, as if in his own voice, through the consistent and closed-off force of fiction that he neglects his characters, leaving their psychology thin—nowhere more than in Y’s crucial pivot, embracing all that he reviles.

Y asserts that his ambition was to be the “heaviest” Israeli pianist; instead, long before political debasement beckoned, he had already become a clown in his own eyes. This is revealed deep into the movie, when Yasmine is trying to free him from the commission, and encourages him to return to playing jazz piano. His response is that it’s pathetic to play to, as he puts it, thirty people bobbing their heads. He says that they were miserable then—because they were poor. He declares that his motive for taking the commission is just money. But that explanation falls far short of what’s already stated in his “yes” monologue and implied in the twisted arc of his career: the self-abasement, self-betrayal, and self-loathing of Y’s clowning led him to accept a commission that he despises.

“Yes” asserts that there is no essential difference between yes and no when living in a compromised place that lives by lies. It proposes that, if even living in Israel involves a certain complicity, then there may even be an underlying honesty, however perverse, in unflinchingly embracing that complicity. The fantastic story is a metaphor, a thought experiment: about giving up, voluntarily, everything that gave life meaning and then seeing if your life still has meaning; about acting against your deepest impulses and convictions to find out whether you remain yourself. In considering the nature of Israeli identity, it confronts identity itself. The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try. ♦