Is God Is
Mallori Johnson and Kara Young in Is God Is
To one degree or another, every revenge movie is about the futility of revenge. (Every good one, at least.)
Writer/director Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is is no exception as it brings to mind a maxim attributed (likely erroneously) to Confucius: “He who seeks vengeance digs two graves.” A tale of retribution in which more than two graves will need to be dug by the time the credits roll, Harris’ adaptation of her own play is a searing thriller about the toll that exacting revenge takes — a price measured not just in bodies but in irreparable damage to the soul.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t paid willingly. After nearly being killed in a house fire started by their father (Sterling K. Brown) that led to them growing up in a series of foster homes, twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are bound not just by genetics but trauma. Decades later, they still do everything together: eat breakfast, brush their teeth, even work at (and, in an early scene, get fired from) the same job cleaning an office after hours. When they aren’t finishing each other’s sentences, they’re speaking telepathically in subtitled dialogue — one of many stylistic flourishes Harris employs to distinguish Is God Is from its genre peers.
Their closeness is demonstrated in a prologue set during childhood, when a boy calls Anaia ugly and Racine shows him the error of his ways with the business end of a baseball bat. (Racine’s burns are mostly on her arms and hands, while Anaia’s cover her face and chest — affording the former an easier day-to-day experience and making her especially protective of her sister.) The violence, heard but not seen, is but a taste of the brutality to come after they receive a letter one fateful day.
In it, they learn that their mother (Vivica A. Fox) didn’t die in the conflagration — though she is now on her deathbed. “Men like your daddy always got a tender side,” the wounded matriarch intones as she summons them to her bedside for a dying wish: make their father dead. Real dead. Anaia is reluctant; Racine is enthusiastic. Is God Is is not a movie about turning the other cheek of forgiving and forgetting. It’s about how certain filial bonds — like those between mothers and daughters, but especially the nearly preternatural connection shared by twins — transcend everything else, even when they call upon us to defy the law or traditional notions of morality.
What follows is a bold, unabashedly strange road trip of a movie, the kind you might be pleasantly surprised to learn is receiving a wide theatrical release from a major studio at a time when Hollywood has grown increasingly risk-averse to anything without franchise potential. With its off-Broadway roots, patricidal themes, and talk of goddesses, Is God Is feels at home in the context of ancient Greek theater. There’s a grandeur to even the smallest moments, the sense that Racine and Anaia’s literal and figurative journey is part of a much larger whole. Harris, a first-time writer/director, belies her lack of cinematic experience in one of the smoothest transitions from stage to screen in recent memory.
Is God Is is not a movie about turning the other cheek of forgiving and forgetting.
Racine and Anaia call each other “twin” more often than they use each other’s given names and describe their mission as being from God, by which they mean their dying mother: “She made us, didn’t she?” (Say the movie’s ambiguous title at a certain cadence and you’ll hear the word goddess.) Both performances are exceptional, with each actress feeling like one side of a coin that’s been flipped too many times and never knows on whose face it will land, but Young in particular is superlative. Highly accomplished on Broadway, where she recently became the first Black actress to receive a Tony nomination four years in a row (winning in 2024 and 2025), she delivers what should be a star-making performance as the less visibly afflicted but far more aggrieved sister.
Along the way they encounter the sleazy attorney who defended their father and has since had his tongue cut out (Mykelti Williamson), a faith healer at a cult-like church (Erika Alexander), and a second set of twins whom Anaia and Racine are surprised to learn are their half-brothers. Several of them narrate sepia-toned flashbacks involving their father, whose face is obscured until the inevitable third-act confrontation.
Even when hitting expected plot beats, however, Harris manages to surprise. “Careful with vengeance,” that lawyer writes on a dry-erase board by way of warning, “one doesn’t know where the blood will land.” They don’t heed his warning, of course, and soon find that much of the blood doesn’t land where they intended. That doesn’t stop them from painting the town red, nor should it stop you from bearing witness to their baptism by fire.
You have to see it to believe it.
The major studios have zero presence on the Croisette this year.
I guess she didn’t like First Reformed.
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By Michael Nordine, © 2025
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