Joel on Film

Writer/director Aleshea Harris’ directorial debut is such a rush of kinetic, sweltering style and righteously angering purpose that, unless one is already aware of the source material, it comes as a bewildering shock to learn that the story was designed for the stage. That’s not to discount the idea that the theatre can tell stories with complex visual language, of course. It’s simply to say that much of what really works about Is God Is relies on the quiet introspection of characters who receive close-ups or, in the film’s most crucial expository tool, communicate with a sort of telepathy.

There is obviously an answer to the following question, but as this critic never saw the show on stage, it’s still fair to ask how much of this was pulled off. It’s no secret how the long stretches of dialogue, spoken back and forth between the central pair of twin sisters and the targets of their fully explicable ire, were executed, of course. That’s an intrinsically stagy quality that Harris, as a first-time filmmaker, simply translates to a more intimate setting on a movie screen.

What, though, about the rest of this story, which begins in the distant and shared past between Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), as their cold-blooded and ruthless psychopath of a father set fire to their mother, with unintended injuries to the girls themselves. Now, Racine has disfiguring injuries to her left arm, and Anaia has the same across her face, which, to her, has left her without any prospects of a normal life. They believe their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) died in that fire, having been taken away by the state and cycled through an absolutely merciless foster care system that chewed them up, spit them out and left each of them equally, but quite disparately, bitter.

Something we immediately recognize about these sisters, who call each other “Twin” and—yes—communicate either telepathically or through some form of collective intuition, is that they are thoroughly different characters in almost every respect. Setting aside the similar facial wounds, Anaia looks remarkably like her mother (probably because Johnson looks uncannily like Fox did around her age) and, otherwise, has developed a sense of overt caution, almost as a defense mechanism. Racine is the more ruthless one, prone to violence as retribution for her sister, her mother’s memory or her own dignity.

The plot here has their mother—whom they call “God” on account of having made them, which really only leaves one option for what to call their father—making a simple but quite loaded death-bed wish. That wish, predictably, is for the twin daughters to kill their daddy. The rest of the movie is taken up with that straightforward mission, which either tests their resolve or crystallizes it (you only get one guess as to which sister fits which outcome there).

Each of these actresses is someone to watch, with Johnson ably conveying the character’s insecurities and uncertainty about how realistic their mission really is. Young, though, is a revelatory find as Racine, who is confronted early on with a kind of fork in the road—between committing to the inevitable violence of the plan and seeking a softer road of justice. At one point, she is told she has the eyes of her father, and in a stunning bit of internalization by the actress, we see that, really, there is no other path for this character.

The rest of the cast is an idiosyncratic collection of fully capable actors playing the targets of the twins’ interviews-cum-vengeance—from Erika Alexander (as dad’s next wife, a fire-and-brimstone evangelist awaiting her man’s return) to Janelle Monaé (as dad’s current wife, whose materialism has shredded her humanity), from Mykelti Williamson (as a charismatic lawyer, whose tongue has been removed for his sins) to, finally, Sterling K. Brown as the man himself, soft-spoken in his horrifying world view and unthinkably cruel in his attitude. The sequences in which the sisters seek out their quarry are only repetitive because of the nature of the mission. On a more specific level, there is a good deal of variation within the bloody retribution each of them receives.

The film does shortchange some of its storytelling avenues and attempted digging beneath the film’s surface and ironic ending, but in a way, that’s perfectly fine. Is God Is still works like gangbusters as a showcase for its actors, its sense of occasionally overwhelming style (which, impressively, does not feel particularly beholden to any previous filmmaker, meaning Harris ably proves herself to be distinctive) and its fury at the implications of its revenge tale.

Rating: *** (out of ****)