Is God Is

dir: Aleshea Harris

2026

Things are about to get Biblical around here…

As someone without a fraction of religiosity within them, I can still appreciate the use of Old Testament thematics in the telling of a very Southern tale of revenge. And by Southern I mean the places that fought a war to retain slavery in the US, and by Old Testament I mean people butchering people they’re related to with their bare hands.

I am reliably informed, not by the Bible, but by the legendary Tom Waits, in his song “Dirt in the Ground” that “Now, Cain slew Abel / He killed him with a stone / The sky cracked open / And the thunder groaned” and I have no reason to doubt in Tom Waits now or forever, as opposed to the King James Version of the Bible. A lot of people get deaded in this flick, deaded as doornails, and I think most of it happens in this Biblical fashion, with this Biblical implement, so there’s something there thematically.

I’ve seen other reviewers mention less of ye Olde Testament, and more something like the ancient Greek plays, Sophocles or Aeschylus and such, and well, maybe that’s there too, but that makes this sound awfully highbrow, like we’re watching opera or some shit like that. If this is opera, it’s of the distinctly murderous ‘soap’ variety, rather than the singing and dying of consumption variety.

Not that capital O Opera has any shortage of murderous shenanigans.

Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are twins bearing terrible scars, in their early twenties. Racine is the Rough One; Anaia the Quiet One. Racine’s burns are on her arm and body, Anaia’s are mostly on her face and neck. Whenever anyone insults Anaia, Racine gets protective and violent, and it’s repeated continuously throughout their lives. Since they work together, and this seems to happen a fair bit, they don’t stay in the same jobs for very long.

Products both of domestic violence and the foster system, they expect no kindness in this world, and probably not in the next either. When they get a letter from a mother they thought dead, they take a journey into the dark heart of the South in order to hear their god’s proclamation.

“She made us”, says Racine, so therefore she must be God.

When they see their God, she is even more damaged than they are. Vivica A. Fox wears a lot of compression bandages and a mask as Ruby, and both she and her daughters, in the only fantastical element of the movie, seem to still be burning sometimes. The girls rub ice on their burns to ease the pain, but god Ruby has attendants doting on her and soothing her ills.

The damage to her will soon prove fatal, but she charges her daughters with one final edict: make the man who did this to them dead. Deader than dead, so that she can know peace before she passes.

Racine is all for it, Anaia less so, but they travel together to avenge their mother and themselves. And of course this revenge must be righteous, because God told them to do it, so who are they to say no?

To get where they need to go, they need to visit all the people whose lives their father has touched. We have no doubt as to what magnitude of piece of shit he truly is, because we are shown what happened the night he torched his wife for the crime of trying to protect herself and her daughters from him. He burns her, and the daughters get burned trying to save their god, and he casually saunters out to the veranda to enjoy a smoke after a job well done.

We only see him in parts, pieces, before the climax of the film. He is an elusive but malign presence, easy to follow through the world.

The twins travel to a church with a charismatic healer, a woman called Divine (Erika Alexander), who hooked up with the monster immediately after he set his family on fire, and knew about it, and cared not. She believes not only that he blessed her with a child before disappearing, but has waited lo these many years for the monster’s return. All the alleluias and praise Jesuses in the world can’t make delusional people less so. She has only two things for the twins: a shrine to their piece of shit father of his old possessions, and her son Ezekiel (Josiah Cross) who decides he’s going to protect this father of his he’s never met by attacking the twins.

In this film that sounds so serious it may come as something of a shock that there are passages of what I would call supreme goofiness that undercuts the drama. Bits that are cartoonish even if they’re not intended to be light-hearted or comical. Flat out fucking goofy.

I did not mind too much. The delight for me in the film is watching and listening to the sisters interact, or communicate telepathically, watching the bond between them, the strains upon it, the security within it, the dangers it represents. The fact that watching them follow the breadcrumbs to their awful father is an eye-roll inducing endeavour doesn’t detract from the experience too much.

The net victim along the way is the lawyer who represented their dad on the charges some state brought against him for setting fire to his family. Somehow this lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) got him off, though instead of being rewarded for his unjust efforts, the bad dad rips his fucking tongue out.

Gross! Confronting! How is it that they didn’t ping him on charges for that? He seems to sail through life abusing everyone and getting away with it. Next thing you know they’ll put him forward for president.

At the last stop on their journey of destruction, they find his new wife (the great Janelle Monáe, wasted like so many others by the flick) who is planning on skipping out on her jerk husband and his jerk sons, but she makes the mistake of bad-mouthing the twins’ mother, telling them it’s her fault for staying, blaming her for what happened to her. If that wasn’t bad enough, she spits on Racine and calls her trash.

Now, if your life’s aspiration was not to get murdered, this would be a poor way to go about it. But this is not a subtle film, so as soon as she’s introduced to the film she unceremoniously and bloodily leaves this world, this fallen world, in a brutal mess.

If this flick has a bit of a problem, and it does, it’s that none of the other characters other than the twins are really developed at all. With the final reveal of the father, he’s had ample time to be conjured in our minds without us even glimpsing him, from the trail of abuse and destruction he’s left in his wake. And when he speaks everything clicks. I’m not going to mention the great actor that plays him, because he’s great, and I feel like it’s a spoiler in itself. He does good work, but then he always does.

His sons, though, twins as well, don’t get much of a chance to shine. At least one of them seems to be an entitled and quite dumb jerk, but one of them, the quiet, observant one, is meant to be analogous to Anaia and her quiet, calm ways.

But even then the flicks not happy with that, because a lot of people need to die, so the characters have to act in slightly dumb, preposterous ways. I’m all for the mythic, heroine’s journey non-rational aspects of where their journey is meant to be leading them, and even more all for their vengeance to be realised, but the flick runs the risk of falling into crass and unsatisfying messiness before the end.

And yet, once it gets to it, that ‘end’ that they worked for, that they craved for their own sake and the sake of their God, it is satisfying because… Because they pay a complete price for it, because it comes at great cost, because it indicates that the twin closest in demeanour to their father isn’t going to get what she wants without getting taxed, and that’s as it should be. Revenge flicks always try to get us to crave the thing that the protagonist wants, to make it justifiable, but thankfully this flick screams “sure, get that thing you want, AND you’re no better than the piece of shit you’re getting revenge on.”

There is a reason, for these Christian types, why the Bible says “Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, sayeth the Lord.” But Ruby, their God, commanded the twins to do what they did. So much trauma, all arising from the hands and actions of the worst men, supported and protected by other men, and some women, to allow them to continue harming people throughout the ages.

Maybe, the flick gives us a tiny offering at the end, a tiny glimmer of hope; maybe the cycle of violence can be broken.

Is God Is mostly makes the counterargument, though, being that we will do to others what our parents did to us, forevermore, foreverafter, until there ain’t none of us left.

7 times I forgot to mention the glorious soundtrack by Moses Sumney and Joseph Shirley which really enhanced my enjoyment of the movie out of 10

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“Careful with vengeance. You never know where the blood will land.” – not on my nice new white sneakers, please - Is God Is

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1020644121/