‘Is God Is’ Review: A Revenge Thriller Fueled by Family Trauma
Two codependent twin sisters travel across America to fulfill their dying mother’s wish by hunting down the father who betrayed them. Starring Mallori Johnson, Kara Young, Vivica A. Fox and Michael B. Jordan.
With greater dramatic weight but without the stylistic flair or visual spectacle of Kill Bill, playwright Aleshea Harris’s feature debut tackles a revenge story that shares more than a few similarities with Quentin Tarantino’s classic. Based on Harris’s own play, which she adapted and directed, Is God Is follows the quest for vengeance of two twin sisters determined to track down and kill their father for what he did to them and their mother. Pushing this family’s conflicts to almost operatic extremes, the film also explores the bond between two codependent twins who function as a single unit, often communicating without needing to speak at all.
Told in a manner that is, at least initially, surprisingly light, the film is ultimately nothing less than a brutal tragedy. Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young) are twin sisters who survived the fire that killed their mother and left them both horribly scarred: Racine with one arm badly burned, Anaia with a face almost entirely disfigured. Her appearance is considered so «monstrous» that Racine has effectively become her protector, acting as her fiercely jealous and aggressive bodyguard against every hostile stare or cruel remark.
One day, to their astonishment, the sisters receive a letter from their mother, Ruby, whom they believed had died. When they visit her, they find her (played by Vivica A. Fox, whose casting directly links the film to Kill Bill) even more horribly burned than they are, seemingly on her deathbed. The woman—whom both daughters call God (hence the title; the film has nothing overtly religious about it, at least not in the conventional sense)—explains how the fire happened, blames their father (Michael B. Jordan), accusing him of setting it deliberately, and asks them, as her dying wish, to kill him. The sisters then embark on a road trip, first trying to locate the man (decades have passed without any knowledge of his whereabouts) and then, if they find him, to carry out their revenge.
From that point on, the film follows their progress—and setbacks—as they pursue their mission, encountering unexpected people and stories along the way that gradually force them to reconsider their plans. Anaia, more hesitant about the mission, begins to waver, while the far more determined Racine shows mercy to no one. More than anything else, what the film ultimately becomes is the story of the warm, deeply intimate relationship between two sisters who have had only each other for almost their entire lives. Seeking out their father is not merely a violent mission but a way of confronting, through violence, their own history and trauma.
Harris constantly shifts between two different registers. On one hand, the film functions as a realistic drama about domestic abuse, patriarchy, and the personal (and literal) scars the sisters have carried because of their father’s violence. On the other, it embraces the conventions of action cinema, sending its protagonists through a series of escalating confrontations with people connected, in various ways, to their family’s past. As the journey continues, the film grows increasingly intense, violent, and above all, bloody.
It’s strange to think that this was once a stage play, since cinematically it unfolds as a road movie that carries its protagonists across the country, through multiple states. What begins on an almost buoyant note, with two inseparable sisters thrilled by the prospect of seeing their mother again, gradually transforms into something resembling hell. Strip away its genre-film trappings—with all the killings and action-movie conventions—and Is God Is could easily be seen as the story of a shattered, mutilated family destroyed by a cruel, abusive father.
At times, however, the film seems to miss the opportunity to become even more emotionally devastating by relying too heavily on the mechanics of action and adventure cinema. The colorful gallery of characters the sisters encounter along the way—parents, spouses, lovers, children, and others connected to the family saga—are pushed toward an almost Grand Guignol level of grotesquerie, softening the raw brutality of the story itself. Perhaps that heightened, playful approach is intentional. Taken more realistically, this would be a tragedy of biblical proportions. And that’s where the title ultimately connects with religion—though perhaps more through the Devil than through God.
