Is God Is
An eye for an eye, and a lit match for a lit match.
Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are twin sisters so tight that they can sometimes hear each other’s thoughts. They’re bound by their relationship as siblings and by the burn scars they’ve carried since they were small children—Racine on her arm, Anaia on her upper body and her face. Because of their appearances and their upbringing in the foster care system, they haven’t been afforded the same opportunities as others their age. They scrape together a living as janitors until they’re contacted by the mother (Vivica A. Fox) they thought had died in the same fire that scarred them. Turns out that she’s on her deathbed now, and she has one last wish. She wants her daughters to seek revenge against their father (Sterling K. Brown) for setting the fire that ruined all their lives. “Make your daddy dead,” she tells them.
Is God Is (adapted by Aleshea Harris from her own play) is consumed with the notion of revenge as a kind of moral imperative. The justice system failed Racine, Anaia, and their mother; they were left with their burns, the pain of betrayal, and the loss of their own bright futures, all while the father was permitted to go free. Justice isn’t coming by any legal means, so the twins’ mother demands that they take that justice into their own hands. Racine thinks of their mother as God—“She made us, didn’t she?” she explains to Anaia—and she immediately embraces the mission. She’s the older of the two by a few minutes, assertive and already willing to commit violence in response to some wrong. Her mother’s command is her permission to go further. Anaia is quieter and gentler, willing to go along with Racine because the two are so close, but she has her doubts about the necessity of their mission. The story of the film is built around their conflicting views.
Though its narrative is honed to that single point, the film takes a few detours along the way. Structurally, it’s almost a road trip movie, following the twins as they travel south to meet their mother, then further west to find their father. Often the sisters are the only two on screen, and each scene (including the sequences set outdoors) feels as though it’s taking place in an off room. Perhaps this is a symptom of having been adapted from a play; Harris’s dialogue has the staccato, practiced beat of a script being delivered on a theater stage, and the cast delivering those lines is noticeably small. No pedestrians are on the sidewalks, no other cars are on the road; everyone who appears is significant enough to be at least a part of the ensemble. The movie feels both intimate and insular, a small-scale experiment come to life.
Slightly more frustrating is the way the movie stages its violence. Characters are strangled, stabbed, set on fire, and beaten brutally, and all that violence takes place just offscreen. When we see the aftermath, there’s no viscera: the actors are simply doused in stage blood. Like the blocking and the dialogue, the film’s violence shows its origins in live theater, with the filmmakers using theatrical misdirection rather than prosthetics or CGI to communicate the grievousness of the injury. It’s a respectable decision, but the overall effect is that the violence merely scratches the surface. None of it feels as serious as the themes explored by the story.
Racine visits revenge on a handful of people who have wronged her to varying degrees, and her vengeance takes the same tone and tenor every time. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burn for a burn, a lit match for a lit match. For Racine, all wrongs should be met with the same brutal—and yet shallow—action, even if the original offense had been slight. The story’s villains, too, all rise to the same level of ugliness, a storytelling choice that trades subtlety for a sledgehammer of catharsis. The problem with burning everything down is that after the flames extinguish, nothing remains except ashes to sift through. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Is God Is is in theaters now.