THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
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.
Ruby is not just a mother. She is the origin point of the entire emotional and structural chain. She is both survivor and the first person to fully recognize the Monster for what he is. She tried to stop him. She had a restraining order. She understood the danger and still had to navigate survival inside it, walking on eggshells in real time to protect herself and her children. That is not weakness. That is survival.
The film understands the reality of what it means to live beside unchecked violence. Sometimes survival is de-escalation. Sometimes it is delay. Sometimes it is just making it through long enough to keep your children alive. Ruby is not the cause of his violence. She is the first rupture point the system failed to protect.
Divine the Healer, played phenomenally by Erika Alexander, represents blind faith and the dangerous ways religion becomes distorted through obsession. 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, still questioning whether this absent figure is worthy of devotion while following him anyway.
That is how cycles work.
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. The woman who believes proximity to power makes her safer, only to realize she is enduring the same pain in a prettier package. She is meant to be seen and not heard. She performs perfection because perfection is what survival demands in his world.
When she realizes she can no longer sustain it, her instinct is abandonment. She prepares to leave. Walk away. Disappear the same way he has disappeared from others before her.
And lastly we have the law.
Chuck Hall the Lawyer, played by Mykelti Williamson, is not just a man either. He is the institution. The bystander. The system that recognizes harm and still fails to stop it.
The law itself fails first. Chuck Hall got the Monster acquitted for setting his own family on fire, and that verdict does not just free him. It confirms something deeper. It confirms that he is untouchable. The system that is supposed to create accountability instead hands a dangerous man proof that he has none. In a way, the law makes him feel more like God.
So when the Monster later cuts out the lawyer’s tongue, the lawyer becomes a mirror of that failure on a personal level. He knows everything. He has seen the Monster up close. But instead of going to authorities or using what he knows to stop further harm, he turns inward. He chooses self preservation and begins conditioning himself to endure more violence. He prepares for pain instead of preventing it.
That is where the film sharpens its larger argument. It is not only 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 with power that refuses to intervene or individuals who witness harm and choose silence over accountability, the pattern repeats.
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.
But Harris does not frame these women as foolish or weak. She frames them as different responses to the same destructive force. What makes the women in Is God Is feel so layered is that every woman represents a different survival mechanism. One worships. One runs. One kills. One questions. One tries to heal. One tries to understand. And none of them are surface level.
What Harris does so beautifully is show how abuse evolves and mutates through everyone it touches. And yet nobody leaves this story untouched.
That is where the title Is God Is becomes interesting. To Racine it is a declaration. To Anaia it is a question. One says “God is.” The other asks “Is God?” And that tension 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.
That idea echoes throughout the entire film.
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, blaxploitation aesthetics, 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.
One thing I already know will create backlash, especially within parts of the Black community, is the film’s relationship to faith, violence, and the Black family structure. Anytime religion or God enters a film in unconventional ways, people immediately jump to calling it blasphemous instead of engaging with what the film is actually saying.
But I do not think Is God Is is criticizing faith itself. If anything, it is questioning what happens when faith gets filtered through damaged people, obsession, ego, and manipulation. There is nothing wrong with faith. The danger is always in the messenger and how that message is being weaponized or interpreted.
And I also think some people are going to interpret this film as “anti [insert frequent term you see floating in disagreement]” simply because it allows Black people to exist in messy, violent, complicated spaces that we are rarely given permission to occupy onscreen.
But this is not a “Black movie,” his is a universal story told through Black bodies. Too often Black art is expected to represent us positively before it is allowed to simply represent us honestly. We say we want range, complexity, and artistic freedom from our artists, but sometimes only within the boundaries of respectability.
Is God Is challenges that completely.
Because if this story feels like it is tearing down the Black family, then the real question becomes what exactly is being exposed here that was healthy to begin with. The family in this film was already broken by unchecked violence, silence, worship, fear, and systems that failed to intervene. The destruction did not begin with the women reacting to the violence. It began with the violence itself.
And that is what makes the film universal. The Monster is not a Black man. He is an archetype. A destructive force that exists across race, class, gender, and community. The film just allows Black actors to embody those archetypes in ways Hollywood rarely permits.
What struck me most is how 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 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. Or maybe more accurately, it asks us to think deeper about how trauma is created, upheld, inherited, survived, and sometimes avenged.
10 out of 10.