Name: Is God Is Review: Aleshea Harris’ Debut Is a Thrilling Revenge Film — Review
Rating: 8

During the second act of Aleshea Harris’ excellent debut Is God Is, vengeful sisters Racine and Anaia (Kara Young and Mallori Johnson) drive toward their end goal: murdering their biological father at the request of their dying mother, with Death Grips’ “Guillotine” playing in the background. I’m not even sure if the song is technically diegetic, but the point still stands: not only is Is God Is one of the first and only movies I can think of to include a Death Grips needle drop, but it might also be the first movie to actually match the rage and anger associated with the group.

I knew Is God Is was going to be gritty and gnarly beforehand. There was a wave of critical acclaim around its initial release, much of which emphasized the film’s pointed, unrelenting tone and generational commentary, but I was still unprepared for just how committed Harris is to those ideas, especially when she puts Racine and Anaia into situations that become increasingly uncontrollable. The story is rooted in their dying mother, whom Racine refers to as God, and the horrific abuse that created the sisters’ entire relationship with violence in the first place. Their father set their mother on fire during a fit of rage and locked the three of them inside a bathroom while it happened, leaving their mother scarred from head to toe and Racine and Anaia with lifelong physical scars of their own. What begins as a revenge mission becomes something much more interested in the damage that survives long after the original act of violence.

And Harris gives the movie a pretty slick genre framework to explore all of this. Is God Is is part revenge thriller, part horror movie, and part surreal family drama, and it never really digs into the sand on any one of those tones. There are moments where Racine and Anaia are genuinely funny with each other, little flashes of warmth that make their relationship feel lived-in rather than purely functional, and the two communicate so much through looks alone that Harris occasionally uses closed captioning to essentially let us hear what they are thinking together as one. It’s a smart way of showing the connection between these sisters without constantly having to verbalize it. Then you get the needle drops, the spurts of hard-hitting blood and violence, and increasingly hard-hitting set pieces that keep the movie moving. There is plenty here for the mainstream horror crowd to chew on, even if the film is ultimately after something much deeper than just its violence.

The most rewarding part for me is how much Is God Is has to say about the way personality, anger, and rage can be passed down from one generation to the next. Racine and Anaia were children when their father burned them, and now they are grown adults retracing the steps of that violence in order to avenge their mother. Along the way, the film introduces the women their father went on to have children with and examines how those children and their mothers choose to deal with (or not deal with) the ramifications of his actions. Violence becomes less of a single event and more of a family inheritance, something that continues to shape people who had absolutely no say in where it began. Pair that with Racine continuously referring to her mother as God, the biblical dichotomy of God and the Devil, and their father functioning as a literal representation of evil, and Harris has packed an enormous amount of thematic material into what is otherwise a pretty propulsive revenge story.

That intersection of religion, race, rage, and the grievances that can exist between children and parents is what really makes the movie stick with me. Harris is clearly interested in the way people construct mythology around their own trauma, and the title itself becomes more meaningful as the film moves forward. The movie can be extremely angry, but it is not angry for the sake of being angry. There is a thought process underneath all of the bloodshed about where that anger comes from, who inherits it, and whether revenge actually breaks a cycle or simply continues it with a different generation holding the knife.

I’m pretty taken aback by the thematic weight of this as a debut from Harris. Is God Is bites off a ton, and somehow leaves you with even more to chew on after it ends. The third act appearance by Sterling K. Brown as their father is especially wild. He is so sinister and pent-up with anger that his presence almost feels like a different movie crashing into the one we had been watching. Harris hides his entire face for the reveal, and when Brown finally appears in front of that Twin Peaks-like red curtain background, the first look at him lands almost like a jump scare. It is an appropriately surreal introduction to a character who has been built up as this almost mythological embodiment of evil.

More than anything, I just really admired how much life Harris is able to squeeze out of this premise. New sets and set pieces keep the movie moving, the tone remains consistently angry without becoming monotonous, and there is a sense of dread hanging over everything because you know exactly where this revenge mission is heading. Is God Is is stylish, violent, funny in unexpected places, and much more thematically dense than I was expecting. It feels like a filmmaker throwing nearly every idea she has onto the screen and somehow finding a way for most of them to stick. I’m very excited to see what Harris directs next – and, for her sake, maybe something a little lighter?