Aleshea Harris adapted her own 2018 stage play for her feature directing debut, and the strange thing about Is God Is is that the transfer to film made it louder instead of politer. Twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) carry burn scars from a childhood fire. When a letter arrives from the mother they believed died in that fire, they drive out to a deathbed and receive a mission from a woman Racine calls God, because she made them. Find the father. Make him dead.
From there it is a road movie with a body count, and yes, the Tarantino comparison is unavoidable. Harris has said publicly that she does not want to be filed under “poor man’s Tarantino,” and she has a point, but the DNA is right there on screen. A dying matriarch hands down a kill order. A stolen address book functions as a hit list. Long stretches of the movie are two people in a room, talking circles around each other while the violence waits in the wings. The needle drops hit like punctuation. Even the structure, a series of encounters with characters who exist mostly to be crossed off, is pure Kill Bill.
Where the Comparison Holds
Harris shoots dialogue the way Tarantino shoots dialogue, which is to say she trusts it to carry a scene with no help. The best sequence in the film is a conversation with a mute lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who communicates by whiteboard, and it plays as pure suspense with almost no movement in the frame. Sterling K. Brown, cast against every ounce of decency he has accumulated over the last decade, plays the father as a soft-spoken reasonable man, and the casting itself does half the work. Janelle Monáe turns a single scene as his current wife into the sharpest tonal swerve in the movie, going from ally to enemy in about four lines.
Alexander Dynan shoots the South in blown-out gold and deep shadow, and Moses Sumney’s score, his first, works in blues and rock textures that feel closer to a stage cue than a traditional soundtrack. Jay Rabinowitz cuts the violence in ugly bursts rather than choreography. That is the biggest departure from the Tarantino template. Tarantino’s violence is thrilling and weightless. Harris makes it clumsy, sweaty, and genuinely awful to sit through, and she does not let you laugh your way out of it.
Where It Falls Short of a 9
The film is 99 minutes and still feels episodic. Each stop on the sisters’ route introduces a character with a monologue, a revelation, and an exit, and by the third one you can feel the machinery. Erika Alexander’s faith healer and Josiah Cross’s Ezekiel both deserve more room than the structure gives them, and the half-brother in particular disappears from the story right when he becomes interesting.
The stage origins also show in places the camera cannot hide. Some of the heightened, near-verse dialogue that must have landed like thunder in a theater sits oddly in close-up, and a few performances pitch to the back row when the lens is eight inches away. Young is extraordinary throughout, all coiled fury, and Johnson matches her with a quieter register, but the supporting cast is playing across two different sizes of medium.
The last act is where I part ways with the critical consensus, which was close to rapturous. Harris earns her ending, and I would not call it a cheat, but the final confrontation resolves faster than the ninety minutes of dread that built to it. There is a version of this movie with fifteen more minutes in the house at the end, and I think it is the better one.
Worth Your Time
Ninety-seven percent of critics landed positive on this one, and it still opened tenth and grossed about five million against a fourteen point eight million budget, which is a shame and a fairly typical fate for an original R-rated feature with no IP attached. It is on digital and on MGM+ now, and it deserves a bigger audience than it got in theaters.
Watch it for Kara Young, who is going to be a movie star. Watch it for Brown playing the scariest kind of monster, the polite one. Watch it because a first-time director swung this hard and connected far more often than she missed. Just do not go in expecting the cool detachment of the movies it gets compared to. Harris is after something angrier, and she mostly gets it.
7 out of 10
Sources: Variety | TheWrap | Deadline | Rotten Tomatoes | Box Office Mojo
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