One of the most revealing things about any filmmaker is just how much darkness they allow inside the worlds they create. An act of godliness in its own right, movie directing means determining practically all the rules of a given reality — setting the stage not just for your film‘s characters but for the real audiences who will witness their plight. The scale of the suffering, the limits of your mercy, whether or not all the pain we see on screen means anything… at all? Cinema, by nature, leaves that decision mostly up to the director. So, when a film shows something really cruel and depraved, the question isn’t “Why?” so much as “To what end?”
Playwright-turned-filmmaker Aleshea Harris confronts viewers with some truly horrific material in her feature debut “Is God Is,” a sparkling road trip revenge epic as stomach-churning as it is spiritually exorcising. From Amazon MGM Studios, this daring, multi-genre thriller centers on twin sisters: Racine the Rough One (Kara Young) and Anaia the Quiet One (Mallori Johnson). Having been in and out of foster care their entire lives, we meet the girls shortly before they come face-to-face with their biological mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) for the first time in many years.
“We about to meet God,” Racine coos, only to be met with skepticism from her sister. Anaia is taller, but Racine is in charge and insists, “She made us, didn’t she?”
Entering an olive green room flanked with attendants (are they nurses? manicurists?), the girls find their undeniably regal mother sitting up. Her death bed looks more like a throne, and with all three women covered in scars, their so far unspoken history evokes the shadowy intrigue of royalty, too. Ruby’s face, held in place by a mask, got the worst of it — whatever “it” was — but her body is covered in blankets. Slowly but stylishly, she pulls the girls into a sepia-toned flashback, where a Monster, their father (Sterling K. Brown), awaits.
“Make your daddy dead,” Ruby instructs, the image of her helpless body, set on fire by the man she once loved in the home they once shared, still burned into the screen.
The attack permanently disfigured Ruby and left both her daughters, who tried their hardest to save their mother as just two teeny-tiny girls, with scars of their own. It’s a vision so evil it practically demands instant justification. But Harris is confident enough in the spitfire material she’s chosen to approach those stakes head-on, skillfully managing her film’s unique tone even as the ultraviolence continues.
Telling her nightmarish tale of survival, Ruby casually smokes a joint and explains to her daughters, “It’s for the pain.” “Is God Is” functions much the same way, as Harris uses dreamlike visuals, pitch-black humor, the perfect soundtrack, and even the pleasures of movie-watching itself to soften the unbearable suffering at the heart of her film.
In lesser hands, that tonal balancing act could feel glib or exploitative. But remarkably, Harris pulls it off completely — transforming her impossibly hard-to-take premise into the foundation of a rhythmic fantasyland that’s heightened by aesthetic choices functioning more as emotional instruments than maximalist distractions. Like a more acidic Boots Riley (someone program an “I Love Boosters”/”Is God Is” double-feature in Los Angeles this spring, please!), Harris uses bold costume and makeup design, paired with some exceptionally clever post-production flourishes, to bring her dueling heroines’ cellular connection to the forefront.
The sisters’ telepathic thoughts appear onscreen while they brush their teeth. Peeing between stops, they’re side by side in split screen. Picking up clues about the Monster’s whereabouts from various witnesses, including his lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) and later wives, the girls wade through washed-out flashbacks interrupted by sudden bursts of color — tethering the nightmarish suspense of the past to the surreal, action-packed pursuit happening in the present. That attention to detail gives Harris’ hazy fairytale a sharp contemporary pulse that’s fitting of its larger philosophical ambitions and well complimented by expertly calibrated pacing.
The ensemble cast rises to meet that wild tonal register, with bursts of comic precision, aching vulnerability, and just enough theatricality to make every new stop on the girls’ quest feel spectacularly organic. Janelle Monáe is especially sympathetic as Angie, the Monster’s newest captive, while Erika Alexander leaves a fierce impression as Divine the Healer, another woman left remembering the Monster — in a very different way. He has other kids too, and Harris introduces each in a way that complicates your understanding of the man at her story’s center.
Everyone the sisters encounter seems to possess a slightly different memory of the Monster. To some, he’s all-powerful and terrifying. To Ruby, he’s pathetic… with a “tender” side. Harris doesn’t go so far as to suggest a man who tried to murder his family might be “misunderstood,” but “Is God Is” never flattens the thorny contradictions of the world its creator chose to explore.
How much of what Ruby said at the beginning should we trust absolutely, and how much has been warped by time, trauma, or the need for vengeance itself? Crucially, “Is God Is” never cheapens Ruby, Racine, and Anaia’s suffering by asking that question. Instead, she smartly maneuvers shifting perspectives to explore how abusers can be mythologized differently by the fractured memories of victims who do — and don’t — survive them.
Harris finds her film’s dramatic soul not in asking whether Racine and Anaia will find their father, but whether the sisters can remain loyal to each other once they do. Young and Johnson are addicting to watch, crafting a sibling dynamic that feels honest, volatile, loving, and frighteningly fragile all at once.
Racine pushes forward with furious certainty while Anaia quietly resists their supposedly “shared” mission, and the girls’ opposing instincts gradually contort the obstacles they face into a broader debate about whether vengeance can ever truly heal the people carrying it out. Even as Racine repeatedly promises her sister that she’ll be the one to kill the Monster when the time comes, their once infallible connection starts to unravel. Ultimately, that uncertainty becomes Harris’ greatest strength.
By the time “Is God Is” reaches its electric conclusion, the filmmaker-turned-genre god delivers the rare kind of catharsis that can only come from a hideous tale told with complete confidence. For all its fire and fury, Racine’s anger can be exhausting to behold, but her creator never permits audiences to forget what’s behind that rage. If a woman being burned alive in her own bathtub isn’t enough cause for revenge, what possibly could be? And yet, “Is God Is” leaves room for the possibility that Anaia’s instinct to forgive may still be the stronger act. Harris refuses easy answers, and announces herself as a singular cinematic force in the hell her story brings just the same.
Grade: A-
From Amazon MGM Studios, “Is God Is” hits theaters on Friday, May 15.
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