Directed by Aleshea Harris, Is God Is is bold, comedic, neo-noir, gory, violent, and one of the best revenge films I’ve seen in a very long time. This is the kind of movie that sits with you long after the credits roll because it is not trying to simply entertain you. It wants you to think. It wants you to dissect. It wants you to sit in discomfort and question why certain things make you uncomfortable in the first place.
For this to be Harris’ feature filmmaking debut, she did not enter this space quietly. She came in with confidence, vision, and something very clear to say. Is God Is feels less like an arrival and more like somebody kicking the door off its hinges.
The film follows Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, two sisters sent on a revenge mission by their mother God, Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox, after learning she survived being set ablaze at the hands of their father, the Monster, played by Sterling K. Brown, who also is the reason behind their scars.
But what makes Is God Is so brilliant is that it refuses to make anyone simple.
This is not a straightforward revenge story where one person is good and the other is evil. Everyone in this film is deeply flawed. Everyone is carrying something. Everyone is responding to trauma differently. And many carry some of the responsibility. Even the way Harris names these characters tells you exactly what kind of story she is trying to tell.
Most of the characters are not given traditional names. They are God, the Monster, the New Wife, Divine the Healer, The Lawyer. The only people who feel fully named and fully human are Racine and Anaia. I loved that choice because it stops us from attaching ourselves to these characters as just fictional people and instead pushes us to see them as concepts, reflections, and conversations. These are not just individuals inside one story. They represent real dynamics, real systems, and real people we may have encountered in life.
The Monster is not just one man. He is ego, violence, manipulation, and unchecked power. What Harris does so beautifully is show how abuse evolves and mutates through everyone it touches.
God, Ruby is not just a mother. She is creation, guilt, pain, and consequence.
Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox, is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because she exists as both victim and catalyst. Her daughters are consequences of the abuse she survived, but also consequences of the subtle moments went unchecked for too long. The film quietly sits inside an uncomfortable truth about how monsters are rarely created overnight, and how generations are shaped by damage nobody addressed or stopped.
But what makes Is God Is so smart is that it never shifts the blame onto her for his evil. That distinction matters. Society has a long history of removing accountability from the abuser and placing it onto the person who survived them. Asking why she stayed. Why she did not leave. Why she did not stop him sooner. Harris understands that dynamic and sits directly inside that discomfort without flinching.
Ruby is not a weak woman. She is a scarred one. A woman carrying guilt, rage, grief, and consequence all at once. Even sending her daughters on this revenge mission feels less like justice and more like the aftermath of years of unresolved pain finally collapsing inward.
Divine the Healer, played phenomenally by Erika Alexander, represents religious obsession and the dangerous ways people use faith to excuse or romanticize harm. She worships the Monster despite him abandoning her before she even gave birth to their child. To her, he is still divine. She places him on a pedestal and never steps down from that worship. And what does that worship produce? A son who defends and idolizes a man he has never even met, not thinking for himself because he was taught to idolize an absent figure.
Then you get to Janelle Monáe as the New Wife, who feels like another stage in the Monster’s evolution. She is the polished version of what he always wanted. A woman meant to be seen and not heard. She has the perfect home, the perfect image, the perfect appearance of stability, but underneath it all she is slowly disappearing inside herself.
The Monster received worship from Divine, then sought out another woman he could mold into that same dynamic. The New Wife suppresses herself to survive him. She condenses herself into perfection because perfection is what he demands. And when she realizes she can no longer live that way, her instinct is abandonment. She prepares to leave. Walk away. Disappear the same way he has disappeared from others before her.
What makes the women in Is God Is feel so layered is that every woman represents a different survival mechanism. They are not foolish or weak, they are different responses to the same destructive force. One worships. One runs. One kills. One questions. One tries to heal. One tries to understand. And none of them are surface level.
And yet nobody leaves this story untouched.
And lastly we have the law.
Chuck Hall the Lawyer, played by Mykelti Williamson, got the Monster acquitted for setting his own family on fire, and that verdict didn’t just free him, it confirmed something in him. It confirmed that he was untouchable. The system that was supposed to create accountability instead handed a dangerous man proof that he had none. In a way, the law made him feel more like God.
So when the Monster later cuts out the lawyer’s tongue, the lawyer becomes a mirror of that same failure on a personal level. He knows everything. He has seen the Monster up close. But instead of going to the authorities or using what he knows to stop further harm, he turns inward. He chooses self-preservation and starts conditioning himself to survive more violence. He prepares for pain instead of preventing it.
And that’s where the larger conversation of the film really sharpens. It is not just about one man’s violence, it is about who sees that violence and what they choose to do with that knowledge. Whether it is the legal system that has the power to intervene and chooses not to, or individuals who witness harm and decide silence is safer than accountability, the pattern is the same.
The lawyer sits in both positions at once. He is the institution and the bystander wrapped into one character, and neither version of him chooses action.
What I kept coming back to while watching this film is that everyone in it is worshipping something.
The Monster worships himself.
Divine worships the Monster.
The New Wife worships perfection and survival.
The Lawyer worships self preservation.
Racine worships revenge.
Anaia searches for understanding.
That is why the title Is God Is becomes so interesting. The film never fully answers what God is. Instead, every character projects godhood onto something different.
Racine feels like a declaration. Anaia feels like a question. One says “God is.” The other asks “Is God?” And that duality becomes the emotional core of the film.
Racine, “the Rough One,” moves through the story fueled by certainty, anger, and vengeance. Anaia, “the Quiet One,” moves with empathy and curiosity. She questions everything, including whether people are born monsters or shaped into them over time.
Anaia becomes the emotional center of the film because she is the only character consistently trying to understand instead of dominate, worship, escape, or destroy. While everyone else is consumed by obsession or rage, she is still searching for humanity inside the wreckage. And fittingly, the film ends with her carrying life.
Creation becomes one of the film’s strongest themes. The irony throughout the movie is that the men move through the world as though they are Gods while the women are the only ones capable of literal creation. The Monster demands worship and control, but Harris quietly reminds us that women are the true source of life, continuity, and inheritance.
Harris never makes the Monster the only villain in the story, not because his actions are diluted, but because the film understands that monsters do not evolve in isolation. Violence grows through silence, fear, enabling, obsession, and systems that refuse to confront it early enough.
The movie asks difficult questions without simplifying the answers.
Stylistically, it is fearless. It swings between dark comedy, revenge thriller, and surrealism effortlessly. One moment you are laughing. The next you are unsettled. Then suddenly you are sitting in reflection on womanhood, religion, trauma, and generational violence.
That balancing act is not easy, but Harris handles it beautifully.
Lastly, one thing I pointed out during and after watching this film is that it is NOT a “Black movie.” It is a universal story simply told through an all-Black cast.
Too often films starring Black actors are categorized by race before they are allowed to be categorized by genre, artistry, or storytelling. We are all guilty of this categorization. Is God Is resists that entirely. It is a revenge thriller, a dark comedy, an art film, a psychological study of abuse and power. It just happens to center Black women.
Is God Is allows Black women to exist onscreen in ways we are rarely allowed to see. Not as symbols. Not as lessons. Not as one fixed identity. But as fully complicated human beings.
There is no flattening here. No attempt to soften them for comfort. These women are angry, grieving, obsessive, loving, violent, nurturing, vulnerable, and emotionally inconsistent. And no woman in this film is small.
That matters because Black women in cinema are usually asked to stay inside narrow lanes. Strong but not angry. Hurt but still composed. Flawed but still respectable. Even when complexity is allowed, there is often a limit to how messy it can get.
This film removes that limit. It never asks for approval.
And I realized while watching how conditioned I’ve become to watching Black stories defensively. That feeling of “please don’t do too much of something to make us look bad.” That pressure exists because representation has been so limited that one character starts to feel like they represent everybody. This film breaks that.
Because Black artists deserve the same freedom white-led films have always had. The freedom to exist beyond respectability. Beyond representation politics. Beyond having to teach lessons or reassure audiences.
Sometimes we deserve to simply exist onscreen as people.
Messy people.
Complicated people.
Broken people.
Loving people.
Vengeful people.
Human people.
That is what Is God Is accomplishes.
It does not ask for empathy. It asks for understanding. It asks for deeper thinking about how we create, uphold, and respond to trauma and revenge.
10 out of 10.