Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I feel a bit like I’m in an impossible position with Is God Is, which is a movie that I have to admit really did not speak to me, but then, I am perhaps not the person it’s speaking to.

I didn’t even realize until after seeing the film that Is God Is is based on a stage play of the same name, and a rather critically acclaimed one at that. I wonder if I would have felt differently about the play? Well, the play was written by Aleshea Harris, who also wrote and directed this film adaptation. I had never even heard of the play, much less seen it, so I have no idea how well it translates to film as compared to its original medium.

I left this movie a little stuck on how dedicated it was to its story of revenge. We have two twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), now young adults but long psychically connected, contacted by their birth mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) after having long ago relinquished custody. All three of them have severe burn scars, Ruby worst of all—she is bedridden and now actively dying—as a result of her husband and the girls’ father (Sterling K. Brown) having set Ruby on fire. Anaia tried the hardest to save her and so is also significantly disfigured in the face; Racine’s face is unblemished but her arm and hand are severely disfigured. And, after all this time, Ruby has summoned her daughters to tell them, “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

The thing is, Racine and Anaia–who just address each other as “Twin”—take up this request, and go on a journey through which a pretty notable body count takes place, and with people who don’t necessarily deserve it. This is a film with an all-Black cast (as was the case with the play) and thus is sort of a Black woman’s answer to Quentin Tarantino, and I’m all for that. I guess I just expected something a little more stylistic, which is how the film was marketed. There’s something more nuanced going here, but if the theme is cyclical violence, it didn’t feel particularly clear while watching the movie. It felt more like a movie that just went along for the ride with these women destroying anything that gets in the way of their ultimate target, their monster of a father.

This much is clear: Racine is much more comfortable with the violence than Anaia is, and this grows into a rift between these telepathically connected sisters (we even get several silent exchanges of facial expressions, translated into dialogue with subtitles). I know this is arguably a silly nitpick, but there’s a moment when Racine and Anaia refer to themselves as having been “from the same cell,” but that would only be possible if they were identical twins, which they quite clearly are not. I could suspend disbelief here if they were two actors who looked similar and at the very least were the same height, but Mallori Johnson is literally four inches taller than Kara Young. Either Aleshea Harris is just deliberately ignoring how this works, or she doesn’t understand that fraternal twins happen when two separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm and develop in the same womb. Furthermore, it’s typically identical twins that report having some kind of psychic connection, and there they are basically telepathic with each other.

All that aside, Anaia is increasingly uncomfortable with Racine’s proclivity toward violence, and that did seem to be a clear thread in the narrative. It just didn’t strike me as consistent, or with thematic clarity, when it came to which characters actually seemed to be dangerous or capable of violence in the end. I could never quite grasp what Is God Is was trying to say, if indeed it was trying to say anything at all. At times it seemed only to revel in its own odyssey of vengeance.

Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the firs time. There’s also a religious thread in this story, between Ruby, the mother, being referred to as “God” (hence the title) because she gave these twin sisters life; and Racine and Anaia’s encounter in a church with another woman their father abandoned, and who is now a cult-like preacher. I couldn’t quite grasp what Harris was going for here either.

There’s a lot going on in Is God Is, and yet each scene kind of takes its time, giving it a somewhat belabored pace. I’m fully aware of the acclaimed critical consensus enjoyed by this movie, which does make me doubt myself a little; maybe this just went over my head for some reason. What am I missing? Maybe I’m just missing something that wasn’t made for me, and that’s okay.

*Ironically, this movie could have stood to have a bit more fire lit under it.*

Overall: B-