Film Review: Yes, God, Yes

Yes, God, Yes
Director: Karen Maine

Vertical Entertainment
Streaming on Video on Demand: 07.27

If there was any doubt that the MPAA ratings system was unbelievably flawed, Bo Burnham‘s instant classic Eighth Grade brought to light some of the inherent problems with it: Teens were kept away from a thoughtful and poignant film aimed directly at them because it was slapped with an R-Rating. Now, just when everyone has forgotten about that deeply unfortunate affair, along comes writer-director Karen Maine’s Yes, God, Yes.

Alice (Natalia Dyer, Stranger Things) is a 16-year-old Catholic girl growing up in a religious household in a very devout community in the mid-2000s midwest. Alice finds herself the subject of an ugly, sexually based rumor at school, though she doesn’t even understand what it is she has supposedly done. But when an AOL chat turns racy, she discovers masturbation and becomes racked with fear and guilt. In a quest to find her way back onto the straight and narrow, she attends a religious retreat to try and suppress her urges.

Maine has written a wonderfully sensitive script that approaches the issues of sexual awakening and spiritual dogma from a point of view that is surprisingly gentle. While the film portrays religious guilt as oppressive and potentially damaging, it’s not a mean-spirited indictment of people of faith. Rather, it’s a compassionate look at the realities of what it means to be human and the confusion of adolescence. It’s a story about self love, not about self pleasure.

Dyer’s Alice is a career-defining work of sheer perfection, and it takes exceptional maturity as an actor to create a nuanced and insightful portrayal of such innocent naiveté. It’s a masterful collaboration between a director and leading lady that is comparable to Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan, and I’d love to see this be only the first of many. Maine is a refreshing and important new voice, and Dyer emerges as a potential superstar.

This charming and frank little indie deals with difficult issues that teenagers face and are too often unable to discuss with their parents—even those with the best of intentions. If there’s a weakness to the film, it’s the fact that many of the other characters are not nearly as well drawn, and seem a bit flat. That said, we are seeing them through Alice’s eyes rather than our own, and it’s a entirely valid artistic choice that is arguably necessary for the story to function.

Yes, God, Yes is not going to be especially popular among fervent Christians, but it’s hardly the raunchy sex comedy you might expect from the title and some of the questionable marketing. It’s a sweet film, and while it does feature sexual themes as a constant, any sexual acts portrayed in the movie are done very tastefully and largely implied, rather than seen. It doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the ridiculously broad classification of a rating that can encompass any film ranging from The King’s Speech to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Yes, God, Yes stands as strong argument for researching content instead of using a single letter as any kind of indicator of whether a film is suitable for teenage viewers. –Patrick Gibbs