Is God Is

I liked this film. I liked it more than I expected to and in ways I did not fully anticipate going in. Is God Is is a revenge story, but it does not feel like any revenge story I have seen before. It is fresh in the way that only a film made by someone who has never made a film before can be fresh.

Twin sisters Racine and Anaia were scarred as children in a fire set by their own father. Their mother, Ruby, whom they believed was dead, sends them a letter. She is alive, she is dying, and she has one request. Make their father dead. Dead. Dead.

So the two sisters get in a dusty Oldsmobile and drive cross-country to fulfill a mission from God. And their mother is God. She created them. That is the logic of the film and it commits to it completely.

The bond between Racine and Anaia is the film. Kara Young plays Racine as pure forward momentum, fury compressed into a body that has learned to channel it. Mallori Johnson's Anaia is softer, more hesitant, quietly resistant to a mission that was supposedly decided for both of them. They do not argue through dialogue as much as through glances. What is unspoken between them is more interesting than almost anything said out loud.

What I found most interesting is that this is not really a story about two sisters united in revenge. It is a story about two sisters who love each other, one of whom is driving toward something the other is not sure she wants. That tension is where the film lives.

Sterling K. Brown plays the father, credited only as Man. The film barely shows him whole. Harris and her cinematographer present him in fragments: his mouth, his hands, his back, his eyes. You feel his evil before you ever fully see it. When he finally appears, Brown is terrifying in the specific way that charming men who do terrible things are terrifying.

He has other children scattered across the country. Every person the sisters meet has a different memory of him. To some he is a monster. To one he has a tender side. The film does not let him be simple. That refusal is one of its smartest choices.

Vivica A. Fox as Ruby, the mother, the God of this story. She appears early and briefly and she is unforgettable. She smokes a joint while telling her daughters what was done to her and to them. "It's for the pain," she says. The matter-of-factness of it, the casualness with which she holds together a horror that would destroy most people, is exactly right. She is not asking for pity. She is issuing a command.

The film is violent. Unflinchingly so. But the violence never exists to satisfy. It exists to ask a question. Does any of this actually heal anything? The film does not answer that cleanly. It lets it hang. That ambiguity is what elevates Is God Is from a very good genre film into something that stays with you.

Aleshea Harris is a playwright making her feature debut and it shows in the best possible way. Southern Gothic atmosphere, spaghetti western structure, Blaxploitation swagger, Greek tragedy moral framework. It should not cohere. It coheres completely. The film has the confidence of someone who does not yet know to be afraid, and that confidence is electric.