★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
“Make your daddy dead—real dead.” Those are the hate-spitting words mom Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) uses to inflame her twin daughters, Anais (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young). For what purpose? To plan the murder of their father (Sterling K. Brown).
Oh, he had it coming. Credited only as “The Monster,” Brown plays a man capable of lighting his wife up like a torch in front of his baby girls, whose own bodies are also licked and scarred by the flames. Brown has connected his character's violence to a "systemic fracturing of the Black household" and a “distorted, toxic masculinity stemming from historical disenfranchisement.” That may be true. But there’s a story spoiling to be heard first. And there’s no way to take your eyes off what’s on screen. No way in hell.
The storytelling here is the electrifying work of Aleshea Harris, making a dynamite debut as a director in the film of her award-winning 2018 play. Yet there’s not a stagey moment in “Is God Is.” It practically leaps off the screen. Harris and the camera are a natural team.
The twins are grown now, after years of foster (non)care, believing their mother dead. Not so. The bedridden, disfigured and dying Ruby summons the girls to her home to the Deep South (She calls it the dirty south.), with the mission to make daddy dead her dying wish.
To Racine (the Rough One) and Anaia (the Quiet One), their mother is God. She made them, didn’t she? But while Racine’s burn scars are mostly out of sight, Anaia’s face is a road map of trauma that prods the memory with horror. So off they go cross country—Lord help anyone who gets in their way—in search of a father they intend to kill Goliath-style by slinging a rock in a sock right in his . . .
Not so fast. There are obstacles. First up is an evangelical healer named Divine, who dad has also seduced and abandoned. She’s played like a strike of nonstop lightning by Erika Alexander. That woman can preach. It’s through her that the twins meet their half-brother Ezekiel (Josiah Cross), a handful himself, and find dad’s address book. It’s a handy tool that leads to the Monster’s now mute ex-lawyer, Chuck (Mykelti Williamson). Chuck holds up a blackboard for the girls: “For fear that it would wag, he took my tongue.” So there’s that.
They also learn dad has a new wife (Janelle Monae) with twin sons (Xavier Mills and Justen Ross) to add to the poisoned family tree. How do the girls feel about that? They don’t talk much, saying volumes through a look or a gesture, which Harris translates in subtitles that can’t come close to the histories that Johnson and Young deliver just by being.
There’s no way to take your eyes off what’s on screen. No way in hell.
Julliard grad Johnson, with “Kindred” and “Vladimir” on her resume, makes subtlety her specialty. Harlem-born Young just comes right at you. She is the first Black actress to be Tony nominated in four consecutive seasons (2022-2025) and the first of African-American heritage to win two consecutive Tonys, for “Purlie Victories” and “Purpose.” From first scene to last, Young and Harris grab you and never let go.
And then comes daddy, played by Oscar nominee and three-time Emmy winner Brown. Director Harris takes her time letting us the see the Monster whole. There’s a flash of teeth, of clasped hands, of feet running. And also that steady sense of calm meant to mask unspeakable deeds. Prepare for a shock when Brown lets that mask fall. He’s a mythic force of terror, a wolf clothed in the disguise of a family man. Everything in “Is God Is” is ferocious, from the dark humor to the darker cruelty, but Brown really gets you good.
I’m not going to tell you if, when and how the Monster gets his. And you’ll have to see for yourselves what violence is inflicted on and by the twin girls he raised in his forbidding shadow. But Harris does lay bare what Brown called the "systemic fracturing of the Black household.” What you see isn’t pretty, but it will take a piece out of you.