That Is God Is (now on MGM+) adapts an Off Broadway play and never looks like it is among its many considerable successes. First-time director Aleshea Harris translates her stage production to film like it was destined for that path, crafting for a wider audience a provocative, funny, and thoughtful revenge saga that vigorously refreshes an old story with new sensibilities. Kara Young and Mallori Johnson star as twin sisters trekking cross-country to find their father who left them scarred inside and out — and then kill the hell out of him. And like any good revenge movie, whether or not they succeed isn’t quite the point.
IS GOD IS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with a black-and-white not-so-halcyon flashback that immediately establishes the broader strokes of our protagonists: two girls sit on a park bench, their backs to us. A boy calls one of them ugly. The other sister picks up a wiffle ball bat and runs off screen to paste the bullies with it. Cut to the present: Anaia (Johnson) is the meek and sensitive twin, with gnarly scars covering more than half her face (think Freddy Kreuger, and that’s not a joke, but a tragic illustration). Racine (Young) is the assertive and angry twin, her scars crawling from her shoulder down to the tips of her fingers. They’re not identical. They’re yin and yang. They brush their teeth together, get dressed together, apply lip balm together. They soothe each other’s scars with ice cubes. They sometimes say the exact same thing at the exact same time. They sometimes even share the same dreams. This is Twin Shit. Oh, and most amusingly, they can speak to each other psychically, their communiques delivered via some amusingly spirited subtitles, never more amusingly than when one telepathically shushes the other lest they be “overheard.”
Now, this is the sort of grindhouse-adjacent story that inevitably includes the phrase, “one fateful day.” So, one fateful day, they receive a letter from the mother they thought was dead. She lives Down South. And she’s dying. Naia and Cine set aside their complicated feelings about this — or maybe they sit alongside them? — and road trip to see the woman. Ruby is their mother, played by an unrecognizable Vivica A. Fox, because she’s also covered with scars, and those scars are covered by blankets and clothes, scars that go head to toe. What the hell happened? That’s what this overdue reunion is for. Flashback to another fateful day when the twins’ psychotic father (Sterling K. Brown) doused Ruby with booze and tossed her a match, the girls alongside her. He burned them all and now they burn for revenge. “Make your daddy dead,” Ruby orders, With Great Vengeance And Furious Anger.
Easier said than done? Of course. And not just because Naia and Cine have never killed a person and aren’t sure if they should shoot him or stone him or find a hammer and do it that way. Yeah, “stone him.” There’s a religio-spiritual-biblical thing going on here where they consider Ruby to be God and use a grand-scheme-of-things justification to follow her will. That doesn’t make them any less leery about fulfilling their mother’s dying wish. Well, Naia feels leery at least, easily the leeriest of the two. “We ain’t killers!” she proclaims. “I am,” Cine replies. Eventually, Cine will put a rock in a sock and prove this to be true, and that’s not a spoiler, as the movie moves with a certain inevitability as the twin sisters work their way through the wreckage their father left behind — his exes, his other offspring, his former lawyer — and reach what’s best described as an inflection point.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Is God Is is as Kill Bill-pilled as any movie out there, and it moves with the propulsive heightened-reality energy of Love Lies Bleeding.
Performance Worth Watching: Both leads are brilliant in their characterizations, but Johnson, whose eyes stubbornly refuse to harden, ultimately has a more fraught and complicated emotional arc.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Harris’ greatest achievement with Is God Is is how she doesn’t get us cheering when things get nasty. That’s obviously intentional, and not necessarily rooted in the usual violence-begats-violence treatise on the folly of revenge. It’s more culturally specific in its details and subtext, the twins’ story funneled through the Black American experience, and offers no concrete answers to unanswerable questions about the morality of brutality in response to brutality. The film pushes further than most revenge sagas, past relentless bleakness to something quietly transcendent and hopeful, turning a stereotypical third-act plot twist into something thematically relevant. “It’s in the blood,” one character asserts about the propensity for violence, and Harris’s goal is to challenge that age-old notion, here rendered as a lame excuse to commit the sins of the father in the name of some warped sense of destiny.
Harris fulfills the purpose of this episodic road trip with considerable style. This is a robust film, fully cinematic and never showing the seams of its stage origins. It brims with infectious attitude, creating and nurturing a near-cartoonish reality that’s vivid and immediate, like Cine might reach out of the screen and smack you if you laugh at the wrong thing. The story exists seemingly out of time (read: I didn’t spot a smartphone) and the director employs exaggeration to underscore moments of comedy or thematic relevance, e.g., when Ruby removes her blankets to reveal that she’s still smoldering, a literal haze filling the frame. A terrific supporting cast — Janelle Monae, Erika Alexander, and Mykelti Williamson leave distinct impressions by stealing scenes — further colors Harris’ fresh twist on well-worn meeting-weirdos-on-the-road cliches. Ruby will never forget what happened to her, and there’s a good chance you won’t soon move on from the potent words and pictures Harris renders as Is God Is.
Our Call: Few films are as entertaining as they are meaningful, and Is God Is clears that hurdle with intent and purpose. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
