If not for the smartphones that the characters occasionally use, you might mistake Is God Is for some lost blaxploitation movie from the 1970s. Its main characters embark on a road trip to extract vengeance. Speaking of whom, every single character here is Black. The backdrops are clearly filmed in rural Louisiana even though much of the story is meant to be taking place in California, and the picture comes through in grainy Technicolor just like those blasts from the past.
Look closer, though. Writer-director Aleshea Harris adapts this from her own stage play, and she makes this a remarkably unstagey piece by means of innovative techniques that you wouldn’t have seen in those old Black films. We’re talking sepia-toned flashbacks that pop with the colors of spilled blood or a Saturday morning TV cartoon, as well as split-screens that breathe new life to that hackneyed technique. When the twin protagonists communicate with each other telepathically, we see their speech conveyed on the screen via subtitles without dialogue. Is God Is might not work as well as Harris would like, but this first-time filmmaker’s talent produces stretches of great vividness and power.
The story begins with sisters Racine and Anaia (Kara Young and Mallori Johnson) receiving a letter from their mother (Vivica A. Fox), whom they had assumed was dead. When these twins with long, gold-dyed braids visit her, they find her terminally ill and burned over 90% of her body. On her deathbed, she commands her daughters to track down and kill their father (Sterling K. Brown), as well as everyone who might stand in their way. The man certainly has it coming, as he was the one who doused their mother with accelerant and set her on fire, leaving burns all over her body as well as on Racine’s left arm and Anaia’s face and chest.
Everyone else seems equally crippled by that father. His second wife (Erika Alexander) is a Christian fundamentalist preacher who has been waiting for him to come back to her for almost 20 years. Her son (Josiah Cross) tries to kill his half-sisters to stop them from murdering his father. His third wife (Janelle Monáe) lives in terror of her husband discovering a speck of dust in the mansion that they share. The defense lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who won the father’s acquittal of any criminal charges has been repaid by having his client cut out his tongue.
At the center of it all is Brown, who is cannily cast against type so that we’re not sure what to think during Racine’s climactic confrontation with him, when her father either conjures up or performs a good imitation of a heartfelt half-apology for the damage he did. (“She wouldn’t hold me. As a young man, I needed that.”) The Oscar nominee makes this character into the scariest man who ever wore socks with sandals, and Is God Is works best as an examination of the damage that one depraved man has wreaked on everyone he has ever come into contact with.
That’s great, because the movie functions much less well as a Tarantinoid coming-of-age journey for the twins or as an exploration of the tensions between the willful and bloody-minded Racine and the more timid Anaia. If the expression of female rage is more coherent here than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride, that doesn’t say all that much, and the violent deaths near the end could have been executed more convincingly. Just savor its hot, greasy atmosphere and the mythic overtones that lift it above the common pack of revenge-motivated thrillers. Aleshea Harris is a distinctive new voice on the scene, and what will that voice say next?
Is God Is
Starring Kara Young and Mallori Johnson. Written and directed by Aleshea Harris, based on her own stage play. Rated R.
