Writer/director Karen Maine continues her rise with smart and witty comedy, Yes, God, Yes, adapting her excellent short of the same name. Starring Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer who reprises the lead role as Alice, a 16-year-old Catholic who lives a very innocent life in the Midwest. But one night when an AOL chat gets a little racy and she discovers masturbation, quickly Alice start to struggle to resist her new urges in the face of eternal damnation.
With her sense of shame spiraling out of control, Alice attends a religious camp to try and suppress her urges, but when one of the camp mentors starts to flirt with her, quickly she becomes more intrigued by sex than ever as the retreat only has the opposite effect.
With an excellent first act setting up the church camp section, Dyer is excellent at skirting the line of an innocent church girl that wants to find herself and experiment. Dotting between her camp mates, the mentors and the camp leaders, Dyer and the various relationship machinations are superbly played out and it’s the best thing about the film.
With a bombshell that pays off 2, 3, even 4 times, while this isn’t the sort of film that’s going to give you 20 belly laughs, it’s consistently amusing, with clever dialogue, strong situational comedy and superb pacing throughout. Writer/director Karen Maine is a filmmaker showing a lot of promise between this and her work on Obvious Child, exploring each story in a very interesting way. And while perhaps you could accuse Yes, God, Yes of lacking a little bit of bite but this is a good-natured film that doesn’t necessarily need to push the boundary too far to be effective.