Review: Is God Is

Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is opens like a revenge movie and slowly reveals itself to be something thornier, sadder, stranger, and ultimately far more profound. On paper, the film sounds almost gleefully pulp: twin sisters set out across America to murder the father who burned their family alive years earlier. But Harris’ astonishing debut feature is not interested in the clean catharsis of revenge cinema so much as the rot that necessitates it in the first place. What begins as a blaxploitation-inflected road movie gradually unfolds into something closer to a Greek tragedy filtered through gothic Americana, interrogating masculinity, generational violence, and the mythology of patriarchal power with startling confidence.

The film stars Mallori Johnson and Kara Young as Anaia and Racine, twin sisters still physically and emotionally scarred by a fire their father intentionally set when they were children. Anaia bears severe facial burns that have left her withdrawn and painfully self-conscious, while Racine’s scars are less visible but no less defining. Protective to the point of fury, Racine has spent most of her life fighting the world on her sister’s behalf, and Harris smartly establishes early that the twins exist as both complements and opposites: one inward-looking and hesitant, the other outwardly volatile and ferociously certain. Johnson and Young are sensational together, crafting a relationship that feels genuinely lived in. Their rhythms, silences, glances, and arguments all suggest years of shared trauma and mutual dependence extending far beyond the frame.

When the sisters discover their long-presumed-dead mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) is still alive, bedridden, and demanding vengeance, the film kicks into motion with mythic force. Ruby commands her daughters to kill their father, referred to only as “the Monster”, and though Anaia recoils at the task, Racine accepts it with near-religious conviction. The title Is God Is takes on immediate meaning here: God is not a heavenly abstraction but a wounded mother passing judgment from her deathbed. Divine justice becomes familial obligation.

From there, Harris sends the sisters on a violent odyssey through the wreckage the Monster has left behind. Along the way they encounter wives, sons, and disciples still orbiting this cruel man’s gravity, many of them trapped in cycles of devotion, fear, and denial. Sterling K. Brown’s performance as the Monster is fascinating precisely because Harris refuses to turn him into a cartoon. The character is monstrous, certainly, but Harris is more interested in how monsters are sustained; how men mythologize abusive fathers, how sons inherit violence as legacy, and how entire families contort themselves around male cruelty until it becomes normalized.

That thematic richness is what elevates Is God Is far above standard revenge fare. Harris has clear affection for exploitation cinema, westerns, Tarantino-esque dialogue exchanges, and theatrical melodrama, but unlike so many films mining similar territory, the movie’s rage feels genuinely earned. There’s an unmistakable fury running through the film, yet it never feels performative or glib. In many ways, Is God Is accomplishes what films like Promising Young Woman strained for but never fully achieved: a revenge narrative rooted not in cleverness or aestheticized trauma, but in something emotionally honest and deeply felt. Harris approaches violence not as empowerment fantasy but as the inevitable byproduct of generations poisoned by patriarchal brutality.

What’s remarkable is how funny the film often is despite all this heaviness. Harris’ script has a wickedly dry sense of humor, and the film moves with such confidence and momentum that its tonal balancing act rarely falters. Scenes oscillate between absurd comedy, horror, family drama, and outright tragedy without ever feeling disjointed. Alexander Dynan’s cinematography gives the film a harsh, sun-bleached beauty, while the editing keeps everything lean and propulsive. At just 99 minutes, the film accomplishes more than many epics twice its length, packing in huge thematic ideas without ever collapsing under their weight.

If the film stumbles at all, it’s only slightly in its final confrontation. By the nature of revenge narratives, there’s an expectation of explosive catharsis waiting at the end, and Harris instead chooses something messier, quieter, and more morally unresolved. The climax perhaps lacks the visceral release some viewers may crave, but it also feels true to the film’s larger concerns. Is God Is understands that violence rarely offers closure, particularly when the wounds being examined are generational and systemic rather than personal alone.

Still, the film’s ending lingers precisely because Harris refuses to settle for simplicity. Is God IS isn't interested in easy righteousness or tidy empowerment. It’s interested in inheritance, the ways cruelty passes from fathers to sons, from husbands to wives, from one generation to the next, and in the terrifying possibility that survival itself can become its own form of violence. That Harris explores all of this while crafting one of the funniest, sharpest, and most exhilarating directorial debuts in years is nothing short of astonishing. Is God Is is a furious, haunting, deeply original work, and one of the year’s very best films.

4.5/5