Is God Is tells a harrowing tale of retribution, sisterhood, and gender based violence. Far too eerie and clever to be an ordinary slasher, but too gory and merciless to be an ordinary thriller, Is God Is will appeal to the highbrow horror lover with generational trauma anywhere.
Is God Is, Aleshea Harris’ debut film, is just so much movie. Brimming to the top with philosophy, morality, and general weirdness, the film overwhelms the viewer and leaves scenes playing in your mind long after the movie is over. An edgy noir with creepy humor and trippy editing, Is God Is follows twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) as they are contacted by their dying, estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox) who has one last wish: for her girls to kill her abusive ex-husband, the man responsible for setting them on fire and causing their lifelong disfigurement. They travel across the country to find him, confronting various moral quandaries along the way.
Racine (Kara Young) hugs Anaia (Mallori Johnson)
The film opens on flashbacks of the sisters’ childhood as they protect one another from bullying based on their physical appearances. Also introduced at the beginning of the film is its distinctive visual style, illustrating the twins’ thoughts and communications to each other with onscreen text to illustrate their psychic bond. Soon enough, however, the girls are grown up and living together in a dingy apartment. They’re just scraping by when they receive a letter from their long lost mother. When they travel to her home and find her covered in bandages, her gruesome injuries attended to day and night by nurses. Here, Is God Is flexes its editing mastery once again, as the girl’s mother, referred to reverently as God, flashes back to the night that her husband beat her and set her on fire, narrating the horror straight to camera. God herself leaves her daughters with one mission: “Make your daddy dead. Dead. And everything around him? Destroy it too.”
The girls father (Sterling K. Brown) attacks their mother (Vivica A. Fox)
As the girls begin their road trip of vengeance, the movie develops effectively creepy religious overtones. Anaia is hesitant to take a life, but Racine reminds her that since their mother commanded it, God has commanded it. She’s God because “she made us.” As Anaia and Racine travel across the country following their father’s trail of carnage, they find the Holy House of the Conqueror, a charismatic cult led by their father’s second wife (Erika Alexander), who he has unceremoniously abandoned. The girls discover more and more of the lives their father has ruined when they come across the lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who helped him escape justice for killing the girls’ mother. Unfortunately, the girl’s father cut out his tongue after he looked at him wrong. Is God Is uses his story as a warning to the girls when they reveal their plan. “Careful with vengeance,” the lawyer writes to the twins on a whiteboard, “one cannot tell where the blood will land.”
The last act of the film takes the girls to the house of their father’s third wife Angie (Janelle Monae) and their twin boys. Angie, equally abused by the twins’ father, is quickly unraveling. She is shown lashing out against her husband by saving her urine and cleaning his glasses with it. And just as she’s on the road to escape her marriage, she runs into Anaia and Racine, who, by this point, is filled to the brim with murderous rage. After Angie provokes her, Racine beats her to death with a sock filled with rocks. Then the girls sneak into her house by pretending to be strippers ordered for the twin boys birthday, but the situation quickly escalates into more killing, as Racine kills both boys.
Racine and Anaia travel in their car across the country in search of their father
As the movie reaches its climax, it continually confronts violence. Each step closer the girls take on their journey is another choice they make to kill their father. Each step forward is a choice on Anaia’s part to stay silent when Racine kills another innocent. When Racine is incapacitated and Anaia must confront her father on her own, he refuses to confront his own history of violence. Played menacingly by Sterling K. Brown, the girls’ father is eerily calm, refusing to take any responsibility for the violence he committed towards his first wife. “It was a perfectly appropriate response for a young man out of control,” he says. “I was young and I’m sorry.” In the end, the sisters complete the cycle of violence by pushing their father into the bathtub and lighting him on fire, while he pulls Racine in and kills her too, leaving Anaia, and her surprise pregnancy, to face the world alone for the first time.
Is God Is tells a harrowing tale of retribution, sisterhood, and gender based violence. Far too eerie and clever to be an ordinary slasher, but too gory and merciless to be an ordinary thriller, Is God Is will appeal to the highbrow horror lover with generational trauma anywhere.
