‘Is God Is’ Lets Black Women Rage Without Apology

There’s a moment early in Is God Is when a dying woman named Ruby, her body encased in the scars her husband left behind, looks at the daughters she hasn’t seen in years and delivers an instruction so cold and so clear it practically rewrites the rules of what a revenge film can be: “Kill his spirit. Then the body. Like he did me.”

That’s the mission. And what playwright-turned-director Aleshea Harris does with it — across 99 propulsive, brutal, emotionally devastating minutes — is unlike almost anything in recent cinema.

Harris’ feature debut, adapted from her acclaimed 2018 off-Broadway play of the same name, is a genre-blending odyssey that draws on Greek tragedy, spaghetti westerns, Quentin Tarantino, and a healthy dose of Southern gothic horror. Think Thelma & Louise meets The Color Purple meets Eve’s Bayou — and then some. But more than the stylistic ambition, what makes Is God Is genuinely radical is the space it creates for Black women to exist in their full, furious, unfiltered humanity. No apologies required.

Two Sisters, One Impossible Mission

The film drops us into the world of Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), 21-year-old fraternal twins who have spent their lives barely scraping by after years in the foster care system. When they were small girls, their father — a man known only as Man — set fire to their home in an attempt to kill their mother, leaving both daughters with severe burn scars. Racine’s marks run along her arms, back, and neck, easier to conceal from the world. Anaia’s cover her face, a permanent, visible wound that has made her a target for cruelty her entire life. Racine, for her part, has been fighting back on her sister’s behalf since childhood.

They’d believed their mother died in that fire. So when a letter arrives summoning them south to a deathbed, the reaction is immediate and electric: “We got a mama?!”

What they find is Ruby (Vivica A. Fox, tragically regal), her face and body still encased in a cast hiding the scars from the night Man came home and set her ablaze in a bathtub — and made the girls watch. Ruby has one dying wish, and she states it with the certainty of someone who has had years to arrive at the only conclusion that makes sense: “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

And so the twins climb into their beat-up Oldsmobile and head deeper into the Dirty South.

Young, a two-time Tony winner, plays Racine with a ferocious, funny energy — expressive, aggressive, sometimes joyful, always combustible. She’s the one who needs no convincing. “I wanna tell somebody they ugly,” Racine says at one point. “Step on someone else for once. It must feel good, if everyone else is doing it.” Johnson, in what may be a star-making performance, gives Anaia a quieter, more interior anguish — a woman who has internalized so much pain she’s half-disappeared into it. “We ain’t killers,” she reminds her sister. “I am,” Racine replies, without blinking.

Their sisterly dynamic is one of the film’s greatest pleasures. They finish each other’s sentences, share clothing and blond braids, and communicate so fluidly that Harris often replaces their dialogue with subtitles — words aren’t always necessary. But the mission fractures that ease. Their disagreement about whether to go through with it isn’t just moral friction; it’s two different ways of surviving the same wound.

The Breadcrumbs Leading to Man

The road to their father isn’t straight. Along the way, Racine and Anaia encounter a gallery of people whose lives have been touched — and destroyed — by the same man. There’s Divine (Erika Alexander), an eccentric pastor living in a cult-like church, still hoarding Man’s belongings in something close to a shrine, still waiting for him to come back to her and the adult son (Josiah Cross) she raised alone. There’s a shady lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who helped Man walk free after the fire — and who, it turns out, had his tongue ripped out to ensure his silence. And then there’s Angie (Janelle Monáe, brief but unforgettable), the wife Man has been living with in suburban comfort, who appears to be staging her own quiet escape on the very day the twins arrive.

Each of these characters represents something Harris is clearly thinking hard about: the many ways violent men are shielded, excused, and eulogized within their own communities. It’s pointed social critique dressed up as pulp adventure, and it lands.

Then Man himself arrives home.

Sterling K. Brown plays him as menacingly soft-spoken, a man whose horror lives in his calm — the way he frames his most monstrous acts in the language of logic, even righteousness. He’s explained his violence before, and he’ll explain it again. Brown has played unsettling before (see: Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.), but this is something else entirely. Dripping with villainy, as one critic put it, and all the more chilling for the stillness he brings to it.

What Rage Actually Costs

Harris has been clear that she wasn’t writing a message movie. “When I wrote these characters, I wasn’t thinking message at all,” she said at a Q&A following a Los Angeles screening. “It was really, ‘What is activating them? What are their given circumstances? What are they moving through?’”

And yet the message is inescapable — and necessary.

Black women’s anger has long been treated as something to manage, suppress, or pathologize. We saw it when Serena Williams was penalized for showing emotion at the 2018 U.S. Open. We see it across reality television, where Black women are perpetually expected to police their tone. And we see it in the way real-world tragedies involving violence against Black women and children are so often reframed as conversations about the mental health of the men who committed them.

Is God Is refuses that reframe entirely. “It’s against the rules, as I understand them, for Black women to be very expressive in our rage,” Harris said at that same Q&A. “I think people pathologize it, they stereotype us, they’re dismissive of our anger, and they’re not curious about where it comes from.”

Her film is very, very curious about where it comes from.

By giving us both twins — Racine’s consuming, outward fury and Anaia’s quiet, inward collapse — Harris creates a portrait of how trauma bifurcates. How the same wound can produce a woman who burns everything down and a woman who has nearly burned herself out. Neither response is wrong. Both are human. And the film refuses to punish either sister for how she carries what was done to her.

The climax is bloody and brutal, as promised. It delivers on the Greek tragedy premise with full commitment. But what lingers isn’t the violence — it’s the catharsis underneath it. Two young Black women, scarred since childhood, finally breaking free from the shadow of the man who stole their family, their peace, and their sense of themselves.

Harris also wants audiences to sit with what that costs. “I also want [audiences] to sit with what it costs a person who’s seeking revenge to seek revenge,” she said. The film asks, plainly: once the rage runs its course, does it actually heal anything? It doesn’t hand you a clean answer. But it earns the question.

The third act staggers slightly under the weight of everything that came before it — the final showdown between Man and his daughters doesn’t hit quite as hard in its staging as some of the earlier sequences — but it’s a small stumble in an otherwise fiercely assured debut. Harris’ visual instincts are striking throughout, from the tight closeups that keep Man shrouded in menace until the very end to the wordless shorthand between the sisters that makes their bond feel genuinely lived-in.

Is God Is is rated R for strong/bloody violence and language. It’s an Amazon MGM Studios release. And it feels, already, like something that will be passed around and talked about for years — a parable that could have been written decades ago and will still be relevant decades from now.

“Do you ever want to scrape off those scars and see what’s underneath?” one twin asks the other, somewhere along the road. Turns out, they didn’t need to remove a thing.