It’s not like Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer is the only actress who could headline the Catholicism comedy Yes, God, Yes, but she’s perfect for the role. Dyer may be in the middle of her 20s, but her diminutive stature goes a long way in selling the illusion that her character, Alice, is stuck in the throes of her teen years — aches, angst and all — at the dawn of this new millennium, when “A/S/L” became the new “What’s your major?”
Appropriately mousy (church mousy, perhaps?), Alice is a good girl headed down what her parents, pastor and private school faculty no doubt would term a bad road — one paved straight to hell. When an afternoon AOL chat with a stranger suddenly turns saucy, the supremely naive virgin notices a feeling markedly distinct from her puppy love for Leo in Titanic: sexual arousal. With the scrunched face of the curious, she begins exploring those feelings at a church retreat, including masturbation with her cellphone — not by looking at pornographic material, but by enjoying the vibration that results from each wrong move in the built-in game of Snake.
Yes, God, Yes holds some precedent with 2004’s Saved!, starting with its female lead experiencing a crisis both cataclysmic and catechistic, but the satire here isn’t nearly as savage. Nor is it as sharp, best exemplified by a running joke that has Alice not understanding the crude meaning of “tossing salad.” As it’s played, the gag isn’t highly offensive, but also simply isn’t funny; writer/director Karen Maine so greatly misjudges its value — as both laugh line and story point — that her debut feature opens with a title card defining the sex act, like a big-screen adaptation of Urban Dictionary.
Maybe it was a move for pure padding; Yes, God, Yes is based on Maine’s 2017 short, and feels it. In all of 11 minutes, the same-named piece achieves near-greatness and a more consistent performance from Dyer, because the story doesn’t stray into tangents. In the expanded form of 78 minutes, tonal changes abound, with initial acidity all but neutralized by the addition of Alice delivering a patronizing speech more attuned to the pat rhythms of TV sitcoms. While I get Maine wanting to grant Alice an awakening of empowerment to go hand in hand with her sexual one, it rings false and unearned. Ten Hail Marys, please. —Rod Lott