This upcoming Father’s Day, consider watching a film about twin sisters on a mission from God (their mom) to kill the man who scarred them as children (their dad). Based on her 2018 play of the same name, Aleshea Harris’ feature debut, “Is God Is,” appears on the surface as a rather straightforward, if stylized, revenge thriller. But it probes deeper and proves more tragic than anything the genre has delivered in recent years.
For a variety of reasons, the marketing materials for “Is God Is” brought Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” to mind, not the least of which was the presence of Vivica A. Fox as “God” herself. The teaser’s confluence of exploitation flicks, the American Western, violence, and cars make it easy to dismiss this flick as “Tarantino,” but Harris is doing something different here. It’s also not a new comparison. A review of her play from The New York Times also namechecks QT, but alongside him, it references a more telling touchstone, fellow playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh.
But where that Irish storyteller blasted into Hollywood with notoriously brash and vulgar tales like “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths,” Harris isn’t strictly falling back on the very white and traditionally masculine space of these other reflexive blasts of rage. She’s plumbing an altogether different perspective.
The film centers around orphaned twin sisters, both scarred to differing degrees in their youth. Racine (Kara Young) is shorter, headstrong, and hot tempered. Her scars are largely contained to her arms, so she has the dubious privilege of being “the pretty one.” Anaia (Mallori Johnson), her taller and more soft-spoken sister, has scars covering her entire face. She considers her looks a reason to always be kind, feeling she can’t afford to be mean with her particular visage. Harris creates an instant understanding of their fraught and complex dynamic through the use of split screens and subtitles illuminating unspoken “twin telepathy.” Both characters also speak in a shady third person to one another, using a storybook cadence to deliver observations of one another’s perceived weaknesses like they’re narrating to a third party. This is possibly a remnant of its stage play origins, but definitely a deliberate creative choice about the way ideas and emotions are expressed here.
But the complicated balance they have achieved is ripped asunder when their mother, long thought dead, writes, imploring her daughters to visit her on her deathbed. Once there, God, as they call her, tells them to make their daddy dead, filling them in on the abusive and horrifying lore that doomed the trio to a life of literal and metaphorical burning up inside with rage and regret. Fox, who has devoted much of her career as of late to acting in Lifetime Original Movies, uses her scant screentime well, and the power in her presence carries over the picture long after we see her.
Anaia doesn’t want anything to do with the scheme, but Racine is down for the cause with no need for further provocation. To Racine, God’s mission feels like a logical extension of her role in their family dynamic. She’s always been the fighter of the two, the one ready to get violent with anyone who calls her sister ugly. But Anaia sees herself as separate from all this anger. Anaia is withholding a rather transformative secret about the lover she keeps on the side. Racine doesn’t approve of the relationship, reminding her sister she chooses to spend time with a man who insists on sexual positions that enable him to get off without ever having to see her face. Anaia rationalizes this, saying it’s her personal decision, fearful she’ll catch stronger feelings if her eyes ever meet his in bed. Nevertheless, the implied inertia of what they owe one another leads the two on their journey to make good on their promise.
The traditional revenge film shows our protagonists wronged to such a degree that murder feels like the only recourse. In the set-up, the source of this ire and bloodlust is made to be so detestable that we ache to see them destroyed, in as extravagant and satisfying a manner as possible. “Is God Is” gets the main trappings right, for sure, but the more the twins find out about Man (Sterling K. Brown) and the trail he has left in his wake in the years since he nearly killed them and their mother, the less it feels like a hero’s journey and more like a Greek tragedy everyone is trapped in.
This trauma has seeped into every crevice of Racine and Anaia’s souls. The unpaid debt God has asked them to collect looms over them like a curse. The more colorful side characters we meet — like Erika Alexander as a church owner still holding out hope Man will come back to her and their bastard son (the twins’ half brother) and Mykelti Williamson as the lawyer who got him off for attempted murder and lost his tongue in the process — the clearer it becomes that this journey of justice will not and cannot end in something that will leave an audience hungry for vengeance sated. It’s not the sort of thing a gunfight or a car chase will resolve.
Instead, Harris ratchets up the tension and complicates the simple premise by delving into each new supporting character’s mindstate and perspective with the same level of depth as she gives the leads. It paints a fascinating picture about the ways we all carry around the wrong done to us, and, failing the necessary healing to turn that pain into something better, how we go and perform that same wrong unto others. It is a film that explores the texture and vastness of Black female anger on its own terms without ever flattening it into trauma porn or another hollow commentary on this nation’s history of racism.
It can be read as specifically a commentary around the mythical standing of the Black man and fatherhood and his effects on the home, a thesis that led to a certain type of criticism on social media calling the film a psyop designed solely to emasculate. But Man has just as much in common with Zeus or any other patriarch in a classical tragedy.
In the end, there are plenty of visceral thrills and mayhem to be had, but “Is God Is” hits deeper and harder than if it had settled for the trappings of the genre. Lesser revenge flicks offer half-hearted arguments against pursuing vengeance like after-school special mandates to justify the cartoonish violence they know the audience is dying to see. The lip service paid to more challenging concepts are little more than skippable cutscenes about morality in an otherwise barbaric video game.
“Is God Is” walks a harsher path, one that won’t allow the bloodshed on display to live untethered to the systems and cycles that necessitate it.
“Is God Is” is available to rent or own on VOD.