SOME SPOILERS

There are movies about revenge, movies about road trips… buddy movies, and sister movies… movies about rage, and then there is… Is God Is … which is unapologetically about all of them!

The director, Aleshea Harris, is not interested in clean morality. Her film is not interested in making violence comfortable. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you uncomfortable, emotional, and thinking about how it makes you feel long after you leave the theater.

It forced me to focus my own fury on abusers, bullies, and even their enablers who tolerate, protect, or love them. It compelled me to look at physical abuse unflinchingly by digging into inherited trauma, survival, and what happens when people who have been brutalized stop asking permission to retaliate.

The film, which is based on her 2018 play of the same name, follows twin sisters Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, who were permanently and horribly scarred after their abusive father set their mother and them on fire when they were children.

The movie opens with a brutal and beautifully desaturated scene from their childhood: two little girls in pale dresses sitting together on a bench in a field. Their backs are to us. So we can’t see why another child calls one of them ugly. But they do. Unfortunately for them. This is the first f*%k-around-and-find-out moment. One sister picks up a bat and swings off camera. We only hear the crack from the attack. When she comes back into frame, she wraps her arm around her sister protectively. Blood, the only color in the black and white scene, smears across the white dress.

The image tells us everything about this movie's themes.

Love. Protection. Rage. Violence. Trauma.

What we will learn later is that those kids called Anaia ugly because she has horrible facial scars from a burn all over her face. What we learned just then is that Racine will always step up when someone insults her sister.

The movie is a revenge thriller. It’s a fever dream. It’s a nightmare.

Harris is an artful first-time film director. It’s creative, brave, and even fun. This helps balance out the savagery.

For me, the movie works because the sisters work.

Anaia is the quieter, more emotionally observant sister, carrying deep emotional and physical scars. She carries the more visible burns across her face, neck, and back…and maybe that’s why she is more introspective. She is also more observant, more emotional, and more hesitant.

Racine, who also carries visible scars from the fire, is more reactive, aggressive, and fiercely protective of her sister. Her burns are less noticeable on her arms and hands. She is more impulsive, more reactive, more willing to go wherever the rage takes them.

They move through this world like sisters from Greek mythology.

It’s established quickly that the sisters react differently in most situations and are treated differently by everyone. Their relationship feels codependent, comical, intuitive, and deeply lived in. Many times, they barely need words. And several times, scenes are played out only with their eyes; only the subtitles tell us what they are saying to each other with their glances. For many of those moments, we didn’t even need the subtitles!

The performances from Young and Johnson are extraordinary. Never cliche and very powerful. Another brilliant bit of direction from Harris, she balances their sadness, resentments, and mercurial personalities perfectly.

The movie reintroduces us to the twins as adults, working together as cleaning ladies. They are again put in a situation where, when faced with someone recoiling from Anaia’s burns, Racine goes into bear mode! So they lose their jobs.

Days later, the twins receive a letter from their bedridden, dying mother, Ruby, played perfectly by Vivica A. Fox.

She is bedridden and disfigured with burns.

I won’t spoil one moment of these scenes when they are reunited with their mother. It was unbelievable. It’s captivating.

Let’s just boil it down to the point… after she tells them what their daddy did, what happened to them as babies many years ago, and shows them (and thankfully not us) how severe her full-body 3-degree burns were…She gives them one instruction:

“Make yo daddy dead. Dead. Dead.”

I literally almost said out loud in the theater, OK. Let’s go!

Like me, Racine is ready-ta-go almost immediately. Anaia hesitates. This is where we learn about the title. They will do it because their mom created them…she is God. So god has told them to kill their daddy! Again… I say, let’s go! And they do.

I wasn’t mad at it.

So, now, the revenge road trip begins.

They drive, rap, dance, and smoke their way around in a fluffy steering-wheeled 1990s Sedan. This car is its own character: rattling, beat-up, and barely being held together by bungee cords. It’s a vibe! It tells us exactly who these women are: broken, funny, and rattling with powerful personalities.

On the hunt, their first stop is a former girlfriend of their father, the one he took up with after burning up his children and their mother.

The movie then introduces us to a string of bizarre, hyper-specific, victimized, sad, and deeply dangerous characters.

Miss Divine’s if first. The ex-girlfriend. Her house is a church. She is a preacher. Miss Divine dresses in white, casts out demons, holds service in her living room, and carries herself like a Pentecostal prophet and con artist. The second she sees the sisters, you wonder if she knows who they are.

Inside her house, there is a shrine dedicated to their abusive father. He left her…but she is waiting for him to come back. The altar is filled with his old stuff. Deodorant. Candy. A shirt. Address book. Random objects are saved like holy relics.

She tells the girls she took him in as a broken cow and raised him into a bull. She also has his son, an intense young man who lives up to his stare. She tells them she has been waiting for him to come back…since before Jr. was born. Woah.

From the preachers’ house, they next find his attorney. The one who represented him at his trial. The man who helped their father walk free is a Better Call Saul kind of shister lawyer. Now, he lives in fear of their father too. He hires a dominatrix to beat him because he is convinced that one day the father will return and finish what he started. Years earlier, after helping the father avoid punishment, the lawyer made the mistake of expressing disgust and saying the father might return to hurt the mother and children again. For that, the father cut out his tongue.

It borders on the ridiculous and, at the same time, is unnerving. He communicates with the sisters through a little whiteboard. They extract information from him by using a rock in a sock, which is both funny and horrifying at the exact same time.

Eventually, the twins make their way toward the father’s new life: a beautiful home, a beautiful wife, twin sons, wealth, comfort, what looks like weird and disturbing normalcy. It is shocking after everything we know and have seen.

Now, the movie becomes terrifying in a completely different way. There were moments when I put my hands up to my eyes!

His sons, who grew up affluent and are plugged tightly. His wife has PTSD from living in what is clearly an abusive household. There are scenes here that I won’t spoil, either.

I will just say that when the father, played by Sterling K. Brown, finally comes home and discovers revenge has come knocking on his door, he is terrifying.

He does not scream.

He calmly takes off his shoes.

He makes himself a sandwich.

Meanwhile, Racine is dragging Anaia across the floor, trying to hide her under the dining room table. Bruh!

It is chilling.

Not because he explodes, but because he doesn’t.

The calmness is the horror.

Brown plays him with a menace, the kind of manipulation that feels painfully recognizable. He speaks softly. Rationally. Like a man who has had years to perfect the art of abuse. He reframes the fire story, claiming their mother dragged them into the bathroom, into the flames herself. Even as I knew he was lying, I caught myself considering it for a split second.

That is how manipulation works.

That is how abusers work.

And then, once Anaia lowers her defenses, her weapon, and lets herself believe him for even a second, he slaps her hard across the face.

That moment hit me hard because it explained everything about him.

And maybe that is why the movie sat so heavily on me.

Because underneath this stylized story of violence is a story about what prolonged abuse does to people. About children burned physically, emotionally, spiritually, and then abandoned to systems that probably harmed them even more.

There is an old saying: hurt dogs bite.

These girls bite.

And I realized, while watching this movie, that I did not feel sympathy for anyone on the receiving end of their rage.

That reaction surprised me a little, but it also told me something truthful about where I am emotionally right now as a Black woman living in this particular moment.

There was something in this film that connected deeply to a rage I’m feeling. A feeling that, for years, as a Black woman, we have been told to absorb different kinds of violence, disrespect, dismissal, betrayal, manipulation, exploitation, and silence gracefully. Smile through it. Survive it quietly. Be strong. Persevere with grace.

This movie says absolutely not. It says get mad.

It allows these women to retaliate. To become wrathful. To stop being polite containers for pain.

And I think that is why the movie affected me so deeply.

It’s saying something tragic and triumphant. Racine and Anaia are consumed by rage, but what is the cost of revenge, and is it worth it?

Sometimes it is.

This film is savage, emotional, funny, upsetting, theatrical, cinematic, and deeply committed to its vision. It is the kind of film that makes you squirm in your seat while also forcing you to confront your own relationship to justice, vengeance, empathy, and rage.

Finally, this movie is beautifully crafted.

I absolutely loved it.

Not because it made me feel good, but because it understood something ugly and honest about anger. The kind born from abuse. The kind born from being unheard for too long. The kind that stops asking permission to exist and just...is!

- Victoria Bert \ @victoriabnyc