The kill list in “Is God Is” is a short one: a single name, and not even a name at that. The sole target of Aleshea Harris‘ incendiary revenge movie is credited only as “the Monster,” and really, he’s very much just a man. Men are the enemy here, but so are women, their children and anyone else standing between twin sisters Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young) and their quarry: They long ago stopped seeing as human the estranged father who scarred them for life, inside and out, and so their belated mission to get him back takes on a mythically merciless dimension. Inhuman violence begets inhuman violence in “Is God Is,” a bloody, neck-snapping jolt of a film less concerned with moral justice than amoral catharsis.
Though it’s faithfully adapted from Harris’ celebrated 2018 Off Broadway play, “Is God Is” carries a stark cinematic sensibility through a rangy stew of reference points: Harris’ writing tips its hat to the loquacious pulp poetry of Quentin Tarantino and fellow playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh, but also the muscular structural minimalism of spaghetti westerns and the swaggering excesses of 1970s Blaxploitation film. Theatrically, it’s rooted in the unfettered narrative extremes of Greek tragedy; at a literary level, Harris’ vernacular can echo the rugged lyricism of Toni Morrison.
Her voice, in other words, calls to mind a lot of things, but it’s still very much her own: brutally incensed and funny and sometimes absurd, with a precise interest in the complex class politics of contemporary Black America. And though Harris didn’t direct her play onstage, she steers the screen version with aplomb. Shot by Alexander Dynan (“First Reformed,” “The History of Sound”) with an icy daylight severity (that tips, at the film’s crux points, into comic book noir) and sliced to a crisp 99 minutes by editors Blair McClendon (“Aftersun”) and Jay Rabinowitz (“Requiem for a Dream”), “Is God Is” moves with an inexorable sense of drive and purpose to match at least one of its avenging heroines.
That would be Racine, the more assertive and volatile of the twins, who’s introduced — in a brief, harsh, ironically sepia-toned prologue — as a young girl, taking a baseball bat to some boys taunting her sister off-camera. This is the way it’s been most of their lives, since a tragic fire in their childhood home that left Anaia facially disfigured and emotionally vulnerable. Though Racine was left with permanent burn marks elsewhere on her body, her less visible difference has made her her sister’s constant protector, with a vehemence that can make the passive, sensitive Anaia uncomfortable. From early on, Young and Johnson are a beautifully balanced hot-and-cold double act: the former’s itchy, amped-up aggression tempered by the latter’s tense, watchful stillness. This ought to be a major breakout vehicle for both.
Now the sisters are 21, and though time and trauma have obscured the cause of that fire in their memories, things start coming back when they receive a letter from God. To be clear, notwithstanding its cryptic title, there’s nothing faith-based about “Is God Is.” To Racine and Anaia, God is a woman, and human to boot: Specifically, she’s their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), who summons the Northeast-dwelling sisters to her Deep South bedside after years apart from them, with some simple but daunting orders. Ruby was likewise scarred and disabled in the fire, which she reveals to her daughters was deliberately and maliciously set by their unnamed father, who has since moved on and started at least one new family. Now it’s payback time: “Make your daddy dead — real dead,” Ruby instructs, thus gifting the film with its irresistible tagline.
With utmost, unquestioning seriousness, Racine accepts this task from on high: “She made us,” she shrugs, justifying Ruby’s divine authority. Anaia is less convinced — “We ain’t killers,” she pleads; “I am,” her sister curtly responds — but nervously joins the hunt, her protests cutting no ice with Racine even as the collateral body count piles up. The sisters’ quest takes them from the hard-up Bible Belt to nouveau riche California as they join the dots of their father’s subsequent relationships and procreations: Erika Alexander is both frightening and desperately sad as a self-made evangelical preacher still waiting in vain on a man who has long cast her aside, while Janelle Monáe has a brittle, lordly cameo as a trophy wife ill-advisedly flaunting her economic status over the sisters. Big mistake.
It all boils down, as we know that it must, to a seething showdown in a sprawling new-build ranch house, with blood liberally staining the beige of satin-painted walls and khaki cargo pants. But “Is God Is” doesn’t find quite the release one might expect in its linear revenge trajectory, as its consciousness shifts equally between Racine’s justly riled-up fury and Anaia’s mournful wish for a life without the baggage of other people’s sins.
Still, there’s a lurid but undeniable thrill to the film’s most destructive spectacle, and Harris shows little interest in adjudicating between what’s right and what’s righteous. There’s no platitudinal girlboss feminism to be found in “Is God Is,” which more frankly and meaningfully observes the rippling generational consequences of a society where patriarchy and physical violence still wield more blunt authority than the alternative. “We come from a man who wanted to kill our mama, and a mama who wants to kill that man,” says Racine matter-of-factly. Both wildly entertaining and viciously upsetting, this remarkable debut boldly reaps what others have sown.
English (US) ·