Revenge movies usually try to sell you some big, clean moral lesson about how violence only breeds more violence, or how seeking vengeance is like digging two graves. They want you to feel bad for wanting the bad guy to get his skull caved in. Aleshea Harris’ film adaptation of her own play, Is God Is, does not care about any of that moral hand-wringing. It is a mean, funny, blood-splattered Southern Gothic western that looks at trauma and says, yeah, some people just need to die, and the people killing them are probably going to ruin their own lives doing it, but we are going to watch every messy second of it anyway.
If you are coming into this expecting a glossy, prestige thriller, you are going to get hit in the face with something much weirder. The movie is based on Harris’ award-winning play, and she directs it herself for her feature debut. Usually, when playwrights direct their own movie adaptations, the result is stiff and claustrophobic. You get a bunch of actors standing in a living room giving monologues while the camera just kind of sits there. But Harris immediately throws that playbook out the window. She uses the camera like a weapon, framing her characters in tight, sweaty close-ups and splashing the screen with saturated, hot colors that make the whole thing feel like a fever dream.
The setup is brilliantly simple and deeply twisted. We meet Racine and Anaia, twin sisters played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, who carry the literal, physical scars of a horrific childhood crime. Their father set their house on fire when they were kids, leaving Racine with severe burns down her arm and Anaia with heavy scarring across her face and chest. They have spent their lives in a kind of stagnant survival mode until they get a letter from their mother, Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox. They thought she died in that fire, but she is actually alive, barely, in a sterile hospice room.
When they go to see her, she does not give them a warm, tearful reunion. Instead, she gives them a mission. She tells them their father is still out there, living a nice, normal life, and she wants him dead. She wants him to suffer. Because she is the one who created them, Racine decides that their mother is essentially "God," and if God wants blood, they have to go get it.
This is where the movie gets incredibly interesting, mostly because of how Kara Young and Mallori Johnson play off each other. Racine is the engine of the movie: loud, furious, and completely ready to smash a hammer into someone's knee if it gets her closer to her goal. Young plays her with this manic, exhausting energy that feels like she has been holding her breath for twenty years and is finally letting it out as a scream. On the flip side, Johnson plays Anaia with a quiet, devastating fragility. Anaia does not want to hurt people. She is the sister who actually feels the weight of what they are doing, but she is so co-dependent on Racine that she is dragged along for the ride anyway.
Their dynamic is the beating heart of a very cold, violent movie. It is not a clean partnership. It is a messy, painful depiction of how trauma binds people together in ways that are not always healthy. When they are driving across the country in their crappy car, you can feel the decades of shared silence and unexpressed grief sitting in the backseat.
As the girls make their way toward California to find "the man," the film shifts from a gritty Southern drama into a surreal, dark comedy. Everyone they meet along the way is a caricature of human selfishness and delusion. There is a hilarious and deeply uncomfortable sequence with their father’s old defense attorney, played by Mykelti Williamson, who is living in a house full of cheap luxury, completely unbothered by the lives he helped ruin. The script has this rhythmic, almost poetic cadence that clearly comes from the stage, but the actors deliver it with a flat, dry cynicism that keeps it from feeling pretentious.
Then we get to the father's new life, and the movie pulls the rug out from under you. Sterling K. Brown plays the father, and he is absolutely terrifying because of how normal he seems. He is not hiding out in some grimy swamp. He is living in a beautiful, sunny suburban home with a gorgeous new wife, Angie, played by Janelle Monáe, and twin teenage sons who look like they belong in a clothing catalog.
The audacity of his reinvention is what makes the final act so vicious. He got to erase his past, heal his wounds, and start over with a perfect family, while his daughters were left to rot with the scars he gave them. When Racine and Anaia finally invade this pristine suburban paradise, the clash of worlds is wild to watch. Janelle Monáe is fantastic as the clueless, protective stepmother who has no idea what kind of monster she actually married, and the sequence where everything falls apart is a masterclass in slow-building tension.
What keeps Is God Is from being just another depressing revenge slog is the incredible audiovisual design. Moses Sumney’s soundtrack is a revelation. It is a mix of blues, experimental rock, and strange, ambient noises that make the landscapes feel alive and slightly hostile. The music does not tell you how to feel: it just sits there, humming and vibrating, matching the internal heat of the sisters' rage. Combined with the cinematography, which relies heavily on harsh yellows, deep reds, and shadow, the film feels less like real life and more like a myth or a modern folktale.
By the time the credits roll, you do not feel clean. Harris does not offer any easy therapy-speak solutions. There is no scene where the sisters realize that forgiveness is the real way to heal. The violence in this movie is clumsy, painful, and deeply uncool. People fumble with weapons, they scream in panic, and the physical reality of death is treated with a heavy, ugly weight.
It is easy to see why this movie underperformed at the box office. It is far too strange, mean, and stylistically bold for the multiplex crowd who just want a straightforward action movie. But for anyone who appreciates cinema that is willing to be uncomfortable, ugly, and wildly original, this is something special. It is a jagged, uncompromising piece of work that does not care if you like it, which is exactly why it works so well.
Is God Is will be available to own on Blu-ray on 7/28.
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