Is God Is (2026) [Film review]

Is God Is caught me by surprise. I haven’t been following theater super close in the last decade, so I missed the source material’s Obie wins. Looking at the film from a surface level, it’s the kind of movie I would have obsessed about in my 20s. But, what about now?

The mom is God

The mother’s name is God. This is not metaphor. This is what her daughters call her, what the film calls her, what the credits call her. She is bedridden and badly burned and she has not seen her children in the years since their father set fire to the family and walked away from the wreckage into a comfortable new life with a new name and what the law decided was a not-guilty verdict. Now she is calling her daughters back. Now she has a mission for them. She wants her twin girls to find the man who did this and kill him.

Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is is based on her 2018 Off-Broadway play, which won Obie Awards for its writing, its direction, and the two women at its center, and which Harris herself described as taking its cues from “the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk.” That description is not marketing copy. It is an instruction set for how to watch the film. The characters are not named naturalistically.

The Rough One and The Quiet One are Racine and Anaia. The Monster is what the credits call their father. The Healer and The Lawyer and Divine are exactly what those names suggest and also more complicated. The film is expressionistic in its logic and operatic in its feeling and blackly funny in ways that the bleakness of its subject matter could not accommodate if Harris were not operating from a tradition that has always known how to make tragedy and comedy share the same sentence.

In which I explain Jacobean revenge

The Jacobean revenge tragedy is a genre most people have encountered in a classroom, if they have encountered it at all, and Harris is reviving it in a landscape that does not expect it. Jacobean drama, the form that flourished in England between roughly 1603 and 1625, specialized in stories where the desire for revenge consumed everyone who touched it, where the moral architecture of the world was too rotten to produce justice through conventional means, and where the only available reckoning was one the protagonists enacted themselves at enormous personal cost.

This is also the structure of the spaghetti western, the blaxploitation revenge film, certain strands of hip-hop, and the specific strain of American Gothic literature that has always understood the South as a place where old injuries do not heal quietly. Harris is not choosing between these traditions. She is occupying all of them simultaneously, and the film she has made from that occupation is one of the most formally confident directorial debuts in recent American cinema.

Kara Young’s Racine is the film’s engine. She carries the burn scars that her father gave her and a rage that has been organizing itself for her entire adult life and a specific quality of forward momentum that the film grants her from the first scene and never fully slows. Racine wants to go. She has always wanted to go. The mission her mother gives her is not new information about what she already knew had to happen. It is permission, and what Young communicates is the specific release of someone who has been holding something for so long that the holding became its own kind of violence.

Mallori Johnson’s Anaia is the film’s conscience and its counterweight, the twin whose moral hesitation does not stop her from going but does keep asking what it means to go. Their relationship, the telepathic shorthand of it, the way the film occasionally puts their shared thoughts as subtitles on screen, is the most technically inventive element of Harris’s direction and also the most emotionally true. These are not two characters who happen to be twins. They are one fractured personhood trying to decide whether to reunite or remain split.

Vivica A. Fox is the kind of actress that will get a revival later in life ala Pam Grier

The reunion with God is the film’s first great set piece. Vivica A. Fox as Ruby wears a mask to protect her damaged face, and the women on either side of her braid her hair, and the specific clicking sound of their fake nails against each other fills the theater with a texture that is both entirely realistic and completely theatrical, grounding and strange simultaneously.

Harris named Kill Bill’s silence as an inspiration, and she has clearly studied how specific sound design choices can transform a scene’s emotional register without changing a word of the dialogue. The burns and the braids mirror the twins’ own visible damage, and the meeting between these three women accumulates the weight of everything that happened before the film starts and everything that is about to start happening because of this conversation.

Sterling K. Brown as The Monster is a study in how horror lives in the ordinary. He is never shown face-first in the flashback sequences, only body language, only the way he moves through a space as someone who has never been made to understand that the space belongs to anyone else. He is not physically imposing. He does not need to be.

What Brown communicates is a man whose relationship to the suffering he causes has always been one of complete comfort, a person to whom cruelty is not an aberration but the default operating mode, and who, having been acquitted by a court and having changed his name and having built himself a large comfortable house in a nice neighborhood, genuinely cannot be reached by any instrument the existing world provides. The twins are not wrong that there is only one way this gets addressed. The film is not wrong to follow them.

Janelle Monae is amazing too

Janelle Monáe as The Monster’s current wife arrives in the film’s second half as its most morally complicated element. She is also a victim. Her home, her clothes, her surface are the image of prosperity, and the film allows this to register fully before making clear that the prosperity is built on the same foundation as everything else this man has touched. Racine does not forgive her. The film does not instruct you on whether this is right.

Harris has described the film as interested in the way hurt people hurt other people, and Monáe’s character is the place where that interest is most explicitly tested: a woman who is suffering and who is not innocent and who meets a grief-driven force of nature that does not distinguish between the degrees of complicity. This is the part of Is God Is that generates the most discomfort in a film built on discomfort, and it generates it honestly rather than conveniently.

Erika Alexander’s Divine/The Healer occupies the film’s most expansive tonal register. The character functions as larger-than-life on the surface and carries deep pain underneath, and Harris staged the character’s sequences to acknowledge both dimensions simultaneously rather than choosing between them.

The road movie encounters that the twins accumulate on their cross-country journey, the faith healers and the bikers and the unexpected obstacles, are where the film is most episodic and where the Jacobean structure most clearly resembles a contemporary road film. The accumulation of strange encounters is part of the formal argument: you cannot travel toward this specific kind of reckoning without the world putting itself in your way, and each encounter is another test of the mission’s clarity, another opportunity for the sisters to choose to continue or not.

The cinematography is award worthy

Alexander Dynan’s cinematography gives the film the specific quality that Harris’s direction needs to keep the expressionistic register and the emotional realism from separating into two different films. The images are not stylized in ways that announce themselves as style.

They are vivid in the way that heightened experience is vivid, the way the world looks when something in you is operating at a frequency that turns the volume up on everything around you. The color and texture of the film reads as American South without being postcard Southern Gothic, close enough to real geography that the mythic elements can sit inside it without floating free.

Joseph Shirley’s score understands that a film descended from hip-hop and Afropunk and the spaghetti western and Greek tragedy needs music that can move between those registers without announcing the transitions. The score lives inside the film rather than above it, present in the way that the best revenge film scores are present, as something that confirms the emotional temperature the images are already setting rather than telling you what to feel.

Lots of people are spending 2026 getting their first films released

This is Aleshea Harris’s first film. She arrived as a playwright and spent eight years between the play’s premiere and this film’s release developing the craft of the staging, the vocal precision, the dramaturgical rigor that makes the theatrical original as good as it is.

What the film demonstrates is that those skills translate, and that the specific thing Harris understands about narrative, which is that the permission to be simultaneously tragic and funny and mythic and specific and violent and tender is not a compromise between competing tonal demands but a commitment to the full register of experience she is documenting, does not belong exclusively to the stage. Is God Is is one of the best American films of 2026 and Harris is a filmmaker to follow wherever she goes next.

Is God Is is in theaters now via Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios.