I keep thinking about the way Racine looks at her sister’s face. Not the burned part, though her eyes don’t flinch away from that either. It’s the way she sees Anaia, really sees her, in a world that has trained everyone else to look somewhere else. That’s the heartbeat of “Is God Is,” hiding inside a revenge thriller that wears its bloody genre clothes like a statement necklace.
The movie opens with a fire. We don’t watch children burn, thank God for small mercies, but we feel the aftermath in every scar, every foster home, every job that wouldn’t hire them, and every stranger who couldn’t quite hide their wince. Racine (Kara Young) wears her damage on a fused arm she doesn’t bother hiding.
Anaia (Mallori Johnson) carries hers across a face she’s learned to turn slightly away, as if offering the world her unmarked cheek might buy her some peace. Then a letter arrives. Their mother, they call her GOD, all caps, because why not is dying and has something to say.
She says their father set them on fire. She wants him dead.
And just like that, two young Black women with no money, no prospects, and absolutely nothing left to lose hit the road with murder on the itinerary.
This is Aleshea Harris’s first film, and she comes to it like someone who’s been holding her breath for years. A playwright by trade, she understands that dialogue isn’t just what people say, it’s what they do to each other with words. The script snaps. It crackles. It has the rhythm of someone who’s sat in a dark theater watching actors find the music in a line, then rewrite the line because the music could be stranger.
There’s a scene early on where the twins argue about whether to go through with their mother’s request, and the fight escalates so fast, so sideways, that you realize you’re watching two people who’ve been arguing with each other their whole lives. They finish each other’s sentences. They also finish each other’s silences, filling the gaps with accusations and apologies that land in the wrong order.
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Kara Young, as Racine, is a live wire. Not the kind that sparks prettily. The kind that’s torn out of a wall and still thrashing. She’s funny in a way that makes you nervous, the way she grins before she swings on someone, the way she calls people “baby” right before she tells them exactly how stupid they are. Mallori Johnson’s Anaia moves through the film like a held breath. You keep waiting for her to snap, to scream, to match her sister’s volume. But that’s not who she is.
Her rebellion is quieter, stranger. Watch her hands when Racine is talking. She’s always touching something, a table edge, her own wrist, the hem of her shirt, like she’s reminding herself that matter is solid, that she’s still here.
The violence, when it comes, lands wrong on purpose. Not in a moralizing way. Harris isn’t here to lecture you about revenge. But she stages each confrontation like a fever dream bleeding into a hangover. The first man they track down, one of their father’s old associates, doesn’t put up a fight. He just… apologizes. Keeps apologizing while Racine beats him, keeps apologizing while Anaia stands in the doorway trying to decide what she believes.
It’s uncomfortable in a way that action movies never allow themselves to be. Because what do you do when the person you came to punish already agrees with you? What do you do when there’s no satisfying crunch, just a broken man weeping on a filthy kitchen floor?
Harris shoots the American South like a ghost town that forgot to die. DP Alexander Dynan washes everything in sepia and heat haze, making the landscape feel both mythic and exhausted. There’s a shot of the twins walking down a highway, their shadows stretching behind them like they’re being chased by their own pasts, that I haven’t shaken. The flashbacks appear as old photographs, stiff, posed, wrong, as if memory itself has been bleached into something you can barely recognize.
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The episodic structure helps and hurts. Each stop on their road trip introduces a new woman from their father’s wreckage: Erika Alexander as a church lady who’s turned worship into a kind of martial discipline, Janelle Monáe as a “New Wife” who projects her own damage onto anyone who gets close. These scenes crackle with ideas about complicity, about the ways Black women are asked to forgive and forget and heal while the men who hurt them face no consequences at all.
But some of these encounters lean too hard into the comedy, and the satire, sharp as it is, occasionally undercuts the real grief underneath. There’s a difference between laughing at absurdity and using laughter to keep from crying. Harris knows this. But she doesn’t always trust us to know it, so she over-explains a joke or two.
Sterling K. Brown shows up late, and thank God for that. He plays the father like a man who’s already forgiven himself for everything, which makes him infinitely worse than any snarling monster. The film keeps his face hidden in shadow until the final confrontation, and when we finally see him, calm, reasonable, polite, it’s chilling because he believes his own lies. You can see it in his eyes. He thinks he loved those girls. He thinks fire was just… a mistake.
The ending arrives too fast. I don’t mean the climax, that lands with the ugly thud it should, but the epilogue. The movie sprints through its final ten minutes like it’s afraid of its own sadness, and we lose something in that rush. Vivica A. Fox, as the mother, gets one real scene and she shatters in it, every line reading a small earthquake. But I wanted more of her.
I wanted to sit in the wreckage a little longer. Instead, Harris cuts to credits like she’s ripping off a bandage, and the emotional hangover hits you five minutes later, when you’re already walking to your car.
So here’s the contradiction: “Is God Is” is too short and exactly the right length. It’s a mess and it’s precise. It wants to be a genre movie and a tone poem and a manifesto and a dark comedy, and sometimes those ambitions trip over each other. But I’d rather watch a film that fails interestingly than one that succeeds by playing it safe. And this one? It pulses. It breathes. It burns.
Those twins. Those performances. The way they look at each other at the very end, standing in the smoke of everything they’ve done, and you can’t tell if they’re free or more trapped than ever.
That’s a question worth sitting with.
PARENTAL GUIDANCE
Rating: R (for strong bloody violence, language throughout, some sexual references, and drug use)
Violence & Intensity: Severe and sustained. The film depicts beatings (fists, objects, stomping), a shooting with blood spray, a drowning, a strangulation, and multiple confrontations where the intent is murder. The opening fire that scars the twins is shown in aftermath only, no children burning on screen, but the emotional weight is heavy. A man is beaten while apologizing; the scene is designed to be unsettling, not cathartic. The final confrontation includes a stabbing and a death by fire. Intensity is high throughout, with little comic relief to break the tension.
Language (profanity, slurs, tone): Constant. Frequent use of “fuck,” “shit,” “bitch,” “asshole,” and “motherfucker.” One use of the N-word (spoken by a Black character in anger). The tone of the language ranges from darkly comic to genuinely threatening.
Sexual Content / Nudity: Minimal but present. Brief references to sexual abuse in dialogue (no depictions). One scene implies a sexual encounter between a married couple (no nudity, kissing only). A character makes a crude sexual joke. No on-screen nudity.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Moderate. Characters drink beer and liquor in several scenes, sometimes to excess. Marijuana use appears in one scene (characters smoke a joint). No glorification, substance use is typically shown as numbing behavior.
Age Recommendations: 17+ for mature teens only. The violence is the primary barrier, not just its frequency but its emotional weight. Younger teens (15–16) might handle the action but could be genuinely disturbed by the moral ambiguity and the film’s refusal to offer clean catharsis. The language alone pushes this to R. Not for viewers under 15 under any circumstances.
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