‘IS GOD IS’ Channels Familial Fury into a Vengeful Melodrama

Is God Is is a terrible movie title, of this I have no doubt. The name implies a religious element that  isn’t there, while also sounding like a grammatical nightmare. The debut feature from playwright-turned-director Aleshea Harris, adapting her own stage work of the same name, is instead a stylish revenge thriller in the vein of countless Tarantino descendants. Trafficking in the righteous fury of a pair of Black twins hunting down the father who nearly killed their mother and left them permanently scarred, Is God Is is loose, freewheeling, and often lyrical despite its not inconsiderable flaws.

Kara Young and Mallori Johnson star as Racine and Anaia, twins so emotionally in sync that they often seem to communicate without language at all. Harris stylizes this connection through subtitles that flash between them as they exchange glances rather than words. From the film’s opening moments, it’s clear that Racine sees herself as Anaia’s protector; her willingness to fight others who make fun of her sister left unchecked, consequence be damned. When the sisters receive a letter from the mother they believed dead, asking them to commit patricide before she dies, they set off on a blood-soaked journey to hunt down the man who destroyed their family. After all, their mother is pretty much God – having given them life and all.

The film unfolds in chapters drawing the pair closer to their father, crisscrossing genres and aesthetics that pulls from westerns, melodrama, horror, and Blaxploitation cinema to craft a unique-enough revenge tale that also feels deeply indebted to the long line of others that came before it. The performances from Young and Johnson are strong enough to elevate the material, with Harris’ strength as a playwright and ability to write these characters that power their journey. What works best here is the writing itself: the cadence of the dialogue, the care poured into the characters, and especially the relationship between the sisters as Racine and Anaia’s unshakable bond forms the emotional backbone of the film.

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That said, the transition from stage to screen is often awkward. Some of the directorial choices feel muddy or outright amateurish, and you can tell Harris is still finding her footing in the cinematic medium. There are moments of violence where punches and kicks very obviously fail to make contact, with blocking that does little to obscure it. The fact that sequences like these weren’t reshot speaks both to the film’s low-budget guerrilla energy and to its soap opera-esque limitations.

Still, the movie benefits from its grit. Harris doesn’t sanitize her protagonists or flatten them into standard revenge-movie archetypes. Just as much as their connection is defined by love, there is real tension between the sisters throughout. Racine is driven by fury and eager to enact bloody vengeance, while Anaia remains more morally hesitant, uncomfortable with the violence that increasingly consumes their mission. That push and pull gives the film its dramatic momentum, forcing both women to confront not only the legacy they inherited, but the possibility of becoming consumed by it themselves.

As a revenge story, Is God Is doesn’t radically reinvent the wheel, but it does filter familiar material through a distinctly Black cultural lens, often injecting moments of absurdity and dark humor without undercutting the emotional weight underneath. Tonally, the film is actually more cohesive than it initially appears. Harris keeps circling back to ideas of inherited trauma,  violence, and the way cycles of brutality ripple through generations, curdling through time. It also helps that Sterling K. Brown lends his distinctive gravitas to a supporting turn, managing to make his limited screentime into something that raises the temperature of every scene he’s in.

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But for all of the elements that work, I’m left with the feeling that the thing which likely made the original play feel revelatory gets somewhat lost in translation here. A revenge story staged theatrically inherently carries a different kind of tension and abstraction than one presented on film. On stage, heightened dialogue and stylized violence can feel mythic. On screen, they demand a greater level of realism and precision and Is God Is doesn’t always bridge that gap successfully. In the end, the film has plenty of individual elements that work. The performances are strong, the writing is often sharp and poetic, and Harris clearly has a compelling voice as a storyteller. But the movie also feels like an adaptation wrestling against the strengths of its own source material.

CONCLUSION: ‘Is God Is’ is a flawed but compelling debut, anchored by two magnetic lead performances and Harris’s sharp ear for dialogue. The translation from stage to screen doesn’t always land, but there’s enough grit and ambition here to mark Harris as a filmmaker worth watching.

B-

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