Twin flames
Some thoughts on the film Is God Is.
Note: I’ve done my best to avoid major spoilers, but the movie does deal with some heavy themes and a horrendous violent act, so if you’re sensitive to that kind of discussion, this is officially your heads-up.
One of my favorite genres in film is the revenge thriller. Besides the thrills, the best ones are explorations of what leads a person to seek vengeance and what the cost of pursuing it is. I’m also a sucker for a play being interpreted cinematically, so unsurprisingly one of my favorite movies this year is the Aleshea Harris film Is God Is.
Adapted from her play of the same name, Harris takes Greek tragedy, the Southern Gothic genre, several cinematic references, and weaves them through a present-day story about Black people in the South. In the weeks leading up to seeing it, I’d been reading through Flannery O’Connor’s two novels—Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away—which similarly feature protagonists feeling drawn by something higher than them and the results are often cruel, tragic, and bitterly funny. I think it was the perfect mood to be steeped in before sitting down with Is God Is.
Twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are marked, figuratively and literally, by a despicable act of violence visited upon them as children. In a flashback, we see their estranged father (Sterling K. Brown) douse their mother (Vivica A. Fox) in alcohol while she lays a tub before bringing the girls into the bathroom and dropping a lit match on her. We never see Brown’s face but it’s a chilling scene where he does this horrible act and calmly walks back to the porch and lights a cigarette, ignoring, or possibly reveling in, the bloodcurdling screams of his wife and children heard faintly in the background.
The sequence where all of this happens is brutally effective and masterfully directed by Harris. The use of black-and-white, Fox monologuing direct to audience recounting the events of that fateful evening, and the camera wandering through their home is a beautiful melding of the theatrical and cinematic. It’s a scene I can see being executed brilliantly on stage and in less capable hands, it would’ve been less effective when translated to screen. Harris is so in tune with her own source material, what could’ve just been a stagey and gimmicky is a visually arresting and haunting sequence that sets all the events of the story in motion.
It’s a movie full of upsetting moments like this one. Later on, the girls, who were separated from their mother after surviving the fire and told she was dead, receive a letter from her. This time, she actually is dying and needs them to go see her. They refer to their mother Ruby as God (“She made us, didn’t she?”) and the scene where they meet her after all those years is what leads into the flashback sequence.
Kill Bill feels like the most obvious reference to pull for this one, if only for the appearance of Vivica A. Fox. I haven’t been enjoying what’s coming out of Quentin Tarantino’s mouth these days1, but he’s one of the few people who knows how to build tension and even work a flashback in on the way to its conclusion. I think Kleber Mendonça Filho did this successfully last year with a few sequences in The Secret Agent. It’s one of those juggling acts that’s incoherent when done poorly and watching Harris do it seamlessly on her first outing was one of the many times I was sitting up at full attention in the theater and later at home when I was able to give it a proper rewatch.
The structure of the rest of the movie is reminiscent of Kill Bill, especially with the girls encountering a string of adversaries before reaching the one they’re looking for. The house where they finally meet their father—billed only as The Man—made me think of the villa where The Bride finally tracks down Bill. The Odyssey is my only Greek reference thanks to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? but it is apt for the structure of Is God Is. After traveling to meet God, the twins set off to encounter an eclectic ensemble of characters on their way to The Man.
The lead performances anchor the movie beautifully. There’s a love and trust between the two sisters that’s also expressed telepathically with subtitles on the screen telling us what the twins are wordlessly saying to each other. Their performances are full of rage and resilience with moments of tenderness in between when they’re not having to battle the world together. Young and Johnson have different frequencies as performers that mesh perfectly when it matters.
The supporting cast is unbelievably stacked with several players who like Fox get one scene to really make their mark. Their first stop is at a Charismatic house church pastored by Divine (Erika Alexander). Impregnated by The Man while he was on trial for setting his wife and girls on fire, she waits for him with her son Ezekiel (Josiah Cross) and her shrine to The Man is one of the great visual pieces in the movie. Mykelti Williamson and Janelle Monáe also have excellent memorable turns as they get closer to their destination.
As a fellow St. Louis guy, I’m already on team Sterling K. Brown but this performance is unlike anything I’ve seen him give. By casting Brown as the person responsible for setting everything in this blood-soaked tale in motion, Harris is weaponizing the likeable persona he’s cultivated over the years. Sterling is absolutely game and it’s a performance that chilled me to the bone.
I mentioned up top that the revenge thriller is one of my favorite genres. There are times where it’s fun to take in cheap thrills for an hour or two but the revenge thrillers that really stay with me are the ones that take the cost of it seriously. By going down this path of vengeance, the sisters are getting blood on their hands in the process.
While she doesn’t shield them from what the violence begets, Harris takes the pain and rage motivating it seriously. Even though this path will have its costs, we’ve seen what was taken from the girls and their mother. We’ve seen what happened to their bodies and souls and while it’s easy to tell someone to just forgive and forget, it’s easier said than done. When God tells them to kill their father, Racine uses that exact line. (“Can’t you just forgive and forget?”)
We don’t see exactly happened to the rest of their mother’s body when the nurses caring for her lift the blankets covering her, but the looks on Racine and Anaia’s faces are enough to tell us why Ruby hasn’t been able to just forgive and forget. It’s an incredible, heartbreaking performance from Fox full of righteous fury setting the tone for the rest of the film.
Stage-to-screen adaptations are always a gamble since the essence of the original work is at risk of being lost in the process of being translated. Even if the original author is involved in and supportive of the process, sometimes it’s just meant to live on the stage.
I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Is God Is on stage and if an opportunity ever presents itself, best believe my ticket is already bought. But the source material sounds inherently cinematic. Harris was already an accomplished playwright before stepping into film and her work here only makes me more excited about what she’ll be doing next. There’s plenty more to this that I didn’t get my arms around in this review. The movie’s lingering in a few theaters but is now available to buy-rent via streaming and since it’s an Amazon production2, I imagine it will eventually be streaming on Prime. It’s one I hope more people get a chance to see sooner than later. Anything to keep pushing original voices like this one forward.
(Bernie Sanders voice) I am once again asking Mr. Tarantino to stop whining about how all the new movies are bad. Maybe make that damn tenth movie you keep threatening to make and shut us all up for good.
Seeing that logo in front of the movie was really something. Getting movies funded is a weird game.