There's a moment in Is God Is when one character says, "I want to step on something for once. See what it feels like." It's a line that justifies murder, that hints at violence beyond what most viewers would call reasonable. And yet, when you're sitting in a theater as a Black woman watching it, the words land differently. They become an exhale. A permission slip. A recognition of something the world has spent centuries trying to suppress.
The new film, directed by Aleshea Harris and based on her play, stars Kara Young and Mallori Johnson as Racine and Anaia, twin sisters on a revenge mission. Years ago, their father tried to burn all three of them alive. He nearly succeeded. The twins survived scarred; their mother, whom they call "God," also made it out. When God asks them on her deathbed to kill their father, they don't hesitate. What unfolds is part biblical reckoning, part surrealist Western, part darkly comic road trip through a nightmare landscape where trauma and absurdity collide.
But beneath the stylized violence and the blood-soaked visuals sits something unexpected: a meditation on what happens when Black women stop suppressing their rage. The film, produced by Tessa Thompson and featuring Sterling K. Brown in a chillingly restrained role, is unapologetic about letting its heroines be contradictory. They are vulnerable and brutal, funny and terrifying, insecure and utterly certain all at once.
This matters because rage, when Black women express it, is almost always flattened into a trope on screen. It becomes a character trait or a stereotype rather than a justified emotion rooted in real trauma. Is God Is refuses that reduction entirely. The anger in this film is layered. It's personal and ancestral at once. As Young explained during press interviews, "Anaia and Racine are fighting for justice for their ancestry, justice for the ancestors."
What makes the film so electrifying to watch is what happens when you find yourself rooting for violence against your better judgment. When Racine brutally murders her father's current wife, played by Janelle Monae in a pitch-perfect performance, you don't look away. When Anaia nearly falls for her father's charm before exacting her revenge, the betrayal stings. These moments should feel exploitative or hollow, but instead they feel cathartic. That's the specific alchemy Harris has achieved: a revenge story that doesn't ask viewers to approve of every match being struck. It simply asks them to understand why the fire exists in the first place.
Johnson has said she hopes audiences leave the theater "with some sort of sense of release, catharsis." That word keeps echoing. Is God Is doesn't offer healing wrapped up neatly or comfort delivered as inspiration. It offers an exhale. It offers the chance to watch Black women choose themselves, even when those choices are wild and destructive and absolutely unreasonable by polite society's standards.
In a cultural moment where Black women are constantly expected to save democracy, fix workplaces, hold families together, and rescue everyone but themselves, watching a film that prioritizes their fury instead of their endurance feels almost radical. Is God Is isn't interested in making its characters palatable. It's interested in making them free.
Author Jessica Williams: "This is the kind of movie Black cinema needs more of, one that trusts its audience to understand anger without needing it explained away."
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