Is God Is
Written and directed by Aleshea Harris
Written by Aleshea Harris
Starring Kara Young, Mallori Johnson and Sterling K. Brown
Classification 14A; 99 minutes
Opens in theatres May 15
Critic’s Pick
“Careful with vengeance, one doesn’t know where the blood will land.”
These are words shared by a man we encounter in the first act of Aleshea Harris’s directorial debut, Is God Is. Rendered mute after his tongue was violently removed, he scrawls the ominous words onto a dry-erase board in a scene that serves as the perfect epigraph for the film and a portent of things to come.
A pulpy revenge thriller perhaps too easily comparable to the hyperstylized, self-conscious formal swagger of filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino or Martin McDonagh, Harris’s political compass is blessedly more developed than either director. She weaponizes her dynamic use of form and style as a means of testimony and cultural specificity rather than the cool posturing and detached aesthetic provocation of her cinematic forebears.
Adapted from her acclaimed 2018 play of the same name, playwright-turned-filmmaker Harris, who was predominantly raised in the American South, skillfully steps behind the camera with an eye for both the symbolism of the Southern Gothic and the thrill of grindhouse fare. Is God Is follows fraternal twin sisters, Racine “The Rough One” (Kara Young of Boots Riley’s surreal comedy series I’m A Virgo) and Anaia “The Quiet One” (Mallori Johnson, star of Clement Virgo’s 2025 film Steal Away), who are bound by the childhood trauma of surviving a fire set by their father (known only as “The Monster,” played by Sterling K. Brown) with the intention of murdering their mother.
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When the young women unexpectedly receive a letter from their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), presumed by the twins to have been dead for their entire lives, they guardedly sojourn to the Deep South to meet her at her bedside.
Clad in ornately decorated compression garments supporting her severely burned skin and flanked by three silent attendants (who dutifully braid her hair in an act that speaks to something beyond medical care and toward a form of spiritual communion), Ruby is figured as the maternal divine come home to roost. Now approaching death in truth, Ruby insists that her daughters must find and kill the man who scarred all three women both physically and psychologically.
For Racine and Anaia, Ruby’s command lands like scripture, an almost inevitable inheritance borne from the generational violence they have lived through. They are her furies, however conflicted, vacillating between Racine’s explosively protective instincts that seem to metastasize into something more like bloodlust and Anaia’s quiet restraint and hesitation in enacting any sort of violence.
Kara Young stars as Racine and Mallori Johnson as Anaia in 'Is God Is.'Amazon MGM Studios/Supplied
Despite the vast difference in each woman’s relationship to brutality and the world around them, the sisters are emotionally and physically inseparable. Together they move and feel as a single unit, from their shared style of dress to their symbiotic rituals to their humorous wordless communication (stylishly punctuated onscreen by way of subtitles often arranged in artful spatial forms).
Their movements are synchronized, their dream worlds are shared, and their identities – the defender, Racine, and the defended, Anaia – are inextricable from one another. Young and Johnson’s performances are magnetic, with each actor bringing a sense of ease to the deep intimacies of their dynamic, as well as the lifelong emotional tug-of-war the pair are entangled in.
With thematic and visual influences spanning the likes of spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation filmmaking, Greek tragedies, and the textures of Southern Gothic storytelling (think cicadas thrumming, willow trees swaying in soft, sticky wind), Harris constructs a cinematic world that weds spiritual poetics and gleeful exploitation. It’s a tense tonal dance punctuated by kinetic stylistic flourishes as well as her meticulous control over the sometimes ecstatic Old Testament-style violence visualized in the film (strategically withheld from the viewer at specific moments of brutality).
Harris’s filmic adaptation is an often ruthless and often slyly humorous rampage that offers little (at least, initially) in the way of moral paternalism – here, vengeance bleeds throughout the wake of The Monster’s life, taking with it targets both intended and not. It’s a take-no-prisoners approach that is particularly interesting when set alongside Harris’s interest in religious allegory and examining the class and gender dynamics of Black America.
Unfortunately, Is God Is, for all of its engaging originality, stumbles in its final act – trading textured carnage for a more conventional narrative resolution at odds with its earlier vision. The ultimate meeting of the twins and their father – who has thus far cast a haunting spectre over the film despite being largely absent from the screen – feels curtailed given the impact of his actions.
And while, yes, compartmentalizing The Monster as a character bolsters Harris’s point about the banality of patriarchal violence (and Brown likewise serves up a chilling performance of a man who seems so sociopathically unfeeling as to be rendered almost completely ordinary in his affinity for violence toward women), it also underserves the siblings (particularly Racine) in terms of their own internal worlds. It’s an anticlimactic truncation of story and character that feels like a notable disservice to the previous dynamism of Harris’s script, exuberant utilization of style, and the complicated family history thus far built up.
Yet even with this misstep, Is God Is remains an exciting and audacious debut that announces Harris as an ambitious filmmaker unafraid to wade into the blood and guts of moral complications, one who trusts her audience’s ability to sit with brutality without the demands, for the most part, of absolution or redemption.