“IS GOD IS” IS A FEROCIOUS TAKE ON BLACK WOMEN'S RIGHTEOUS RAGE

From the opening scene of Is God Is, fraternal twins Racine the Rough and Anaia the Quiet have their backs to us, yet their closeness is unmistakable. As the camera edges toward the girls, a boy comes into frame, stops, stares at Anaia. He calls her ugly. The smaller girl, Racine, stands, picks up a piece of wood and follows him out of the frame. And what's heard, but never seen, is retribution.

Writer-director Aleshea Harris, adapting her acclaimed play of the same name, understands revenge and rage as something mythic, bloody, and, strangely, funny. With Is God Is, her stage work comes to the screen with room to roam, sending Racine and Anaia’s vengeful saga onto the open road, one of American cinema’s great symbolic playgrounds. The journey begins with a letter from "God"—or, more precisely, Vivica A. Fox—and from there, Harris lets the film rip.

MILD SPOILERS FOR "IS GOD IS" FROM THIS POINT.

Don't Mind the Smoke. It's for the Pain.

Is God Is calls up a brutal mix of revenge saga, warped family melodrama, and mystic horror. Think Thelma & Louise meets The Color Purple meets Eve’s Bayou, which is to say: buckle up, emotionally and spiritually. The film drops us into the hard, isolated world of twin sisters, two women stuck between a rock and a tube sock, bonded by blood, survival, and the cruelty of their father, Man.

As children, Racine and Anaia were nearly killed by Man. His violence sent them into the foster care system and left both sisters permanently scarred. Years later, they’re adults, inseparable, broke, and still living in the shadow of what he did to them.

Racine, embodied by Kara Young with live-wire ferocity, is the scrappy one, the fighter, the sister most likely to turn a casual insult into someone else’s urgent medical problem. Her scars are easier to hide, allowing her to move through the world with something closer to normalcy. Anaia, played by Kindred’s Mallori Johnson with a tenderness that never tips into fragility, carries Man’s violence more visibly. A lifetime of cruelty has made her withdrawn, wary, and, as Racine puts it, “all emotional.”

Anaia’s been called "ugly" for as long as she can remember, though anyone foolish enough to say it within Racine’s earshot tends to receive a swift education.

The revenge plot snaps into motion when Racine and Anaia learn that their long-lost mother, Ruby, is still alive—barely. Played by Vivica A. Fox with a scorched, commanding presence, Ruby is bedridden, masked, and scarred even more than her daughters. Yet, surrounded by nurse’s aides, braiders, and pamperers, she’s still regal: a queen being attended to. And like a queen, she’s summoned them to fulfill one final wish: "Make your daddy dead … Real dead."

Her request sends the twins after their father, but it also cracks open a moral divide between them. Racine, naturally, is ready to ride. Anaia, however, is hesitant.

Them Twins Burnin'.

From jump, Is God Is is epic to its core and, at just over an hour and a half, surprisingly fleet. Each stop on Anaia and Racine’s road trip toward retribution has its own winking character. There’s the Black church lorded over by Divine (played by Erika Alexander), a charismatic preacher and painful contradiction: she holds sway over her congregation, yet has built an altar to the twins’ father. Man left her and their unborn son years ago, yet she still props him up as a symbol of goodness and piety. There's Man's low-rent lawyer who got him off scott free after Man intentionally set his family on fire. And there's New Wife (played by Janelle Monáe) who's in the midst of planning her escape, a plan which includes leaving her twin sons behind to essentially be raised solo by a man she's knows to be a monster.

Though Man’s sins are revealed early, his presence is largely restricted to flashbacks: tight close-ups, obstructed angles, glimpses that render him more sinister force than fully visible man. And Harris frames their quest as something larger than vengeance. The breadcrumbs leading to their target are characters who have dealt with Man in the years since Racine and Anaia last saw him, and who represent the many ways violent men are excused and protected within their own communities.

Harris has a sure grasp of Greek tragedy and amps it up with Afropunk flourishes and spaghetti western nods. Along with editors Jay Rabinowitz and Blair McClendon and cinematographer Alexander Dynan, Harris leaves few creative stones unturned: inter-titles capture telepathic exchanges, characters introduce themselves in voice-over, and split screens amplify the sisters’ mirroring. Her choices feel so intentional that you may find yourself straining to decipher even the lyrics playing in the background, certain that they, like a libretto, are moving the saga forward.

Young, who made Tony Awards history with back-to-back wins, relishes Racine’s rage. The rock-filled tube sock she brandishes grows increasingly red. Beneath Anaia’s facial scars, Johnson signals ache, fear, and compassion. And together, the actors achieve a symbiotic feat that's harrowing, hilarious, and fundamentally heart-rending.

The twins’ bond is often most deeply felt in what goes unsaid: the serious conversations carried through glances and telepathy. Captions dance across the screen to narrate their inner dialogue, while the film’s narrator rotates among characters. I’m curious how that took shape onstage, but on screen, Harris’s creative liberties feel purposeful. There’s tension in every tight-lipped smile and sorrow in every eyebrow furrow. The result is an omniscient perspective that sharpens the film’s truth: goodness and evil are conscious choices.

This is Destiny Type Sh*t.

Is God Is is, among many other things, a blistering portrait of Black women’s rage: when it snaps, and what that costs. Harris doesn’t treat Racine’s anger as a fire to be contained. She lets it be ugly, funny, righteous, and reckless all at once. Racine’s rage has teeth because it has to. She's spent her life watching the world make room for Man’s violence and then ask his victims to be reasonable about their reaction to the mess he left behind.

But as much as the film centers on the complexity of Black women, it's also rooted in the consequences of a Black man’s oversaturated masculinity, specifically in how he leaves scars long after he moves on. In Harris' story, a serial abuser—assigned the poetically generic name of Man and played by a deliciously villainous Sterling K. Brown—is the source of insurmountable trauma and anguish for many, including and especially his own family. Well, families. Yet, it takes nearly two decades for him to have to face what he's done.

But for anyone who's had their fill of sins-of-the-father allegories, relax: Is God Is deftly draws from the Black church’s warnings about generational curses without tipping into outright sermonizing. Harris forces her protagonists to confront a grim paradox: whether a cycle of inherited violence can only be broken through an act of violence itself. "We come from a man who tried to kill our mama and a mama who wants us to kill that man," Racine says, hoping to sell Anaia on the mission. "It’s in the blood."

Is God Is already feels timeless, like a parable that could have been written decades ago, and will be handily passed down as pointed social critique for decades to come. Harris' vision as a first-time filmmaker is crystal clear: bear witness to misogyny's bitter fruit.