Yes, God, Yes.

Yes, God, Yes is a delightful indictment of the way many puritanical religions, in this case particularly Catholicism, treat basic human sexuality, in a devilishly satirical, 80-minute comedy that features plenty of little nods to the culture right around the year 2000. Starring Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things) as Alice, who gets an unexpected window into the world of sex via an AOL chat room, the story follows Alice as she goes on a four-day indoctrination retreat with her Catholic school and encounters the rank hypocrisy of the religion.

Alice’s morality teacher, Father Murphy (of course), teaches that sex is only for procreation, and that when it comes to sexual desire, boys are like microwaves (turned on easily, no warm-up required) while girls are like conventional ovens. This useful lecture comes right before she receives a pornographic image from a creep she encounters in that online chatroom, which leads her to try masturbating for the first time – something she’s been told, repeatedly, will send her to hell. She’s also the subject of a nasty rumor that she engaged in a sex act with another student, but she doesn’t even know what the act is because she’s unfamiliar with the term used for it. She then heads off on that retreat, which is Kairos by another name, where she discovers that many people in charge of the endeavor don’t exactly practice what they preach.

Masturbation, specifically a girl masturbating, is at the heart of the story here, and that alone makes Yes, God, Yes rather unusual – if that act appears at all in movies, it’s usually boys doing it, and usually just played for laughs. That’s notable in and of itself; women’s sexuality is generally ignored in movies, or seen as something immoral or sinful, as in horror movies that kill off any of the teenagers having sex. To this film’s credit, Alice’s masturbation isn’t treated as a joke, but as a natural part of the story, and a way to keep throwing her into religious doubt. Her sneaking around also lands her in trouble, which in turn lets her see what some of the other campers – and authority figures – are up to.

The script doesn’t pull its punches on Catholicism – not its treatment of all non-procreative sex as sinful, not its inherent subjugation of women – and even ends with a coda that depicts devout Catholics as both provincial and uncurious, even as Alice realizes there’s a world beyond the walls of her parochial school. The film doesn’t delve into questions of faith, but deals with the real-world impacts of the man-made doctrines, which require willful ignorance of human biology and sexuality, and allows the question of why these myriad rules even exist when the Christian Bible has barely anything from Jesus himself about sex to lay unanswered at the edges of the story. Once Alice goes through the looking glass by seeing that single pornographic image, she’s on a path where she’s going to question far more than just what the Church told her about sex.

Dyer was one of the weaker actors on Stranger Things, partly because her character wasn’t that interesting, but also because she played Nancy so flatly, only coming to life when she got involved in a combat scene. She’s better here, because she has more to do, although I still don’t get a lot of energy from her performances. She’s at her best in Yes, God, Yes when Alice is befuddled, confused, or surprised by something, but less convincing when she’s angry, spiteful, or, in one scene, trying to be passionate. The film does rest largely on her, as there isn’t another major character and most of the secondary ones are pretty one-note, and in that sense she is more than up to the task.

Yes, God, Yes premiered way back at SXSW in March of 2019, but the pandemic wrecked its release schedule, and after a very limited run in drive-throughs and via virtual cinema, it went to Netflix in October. At a scant 78 minutes, it’s just the right length for its subject, and if you’re a lapsed Catholic like me, I think you’ll especially enjoy it.