IS GOD IS

IS GOD IS begins with a command from a dying mother: find your father and kill him.

Twin sisters Racine and Anaia have carried the physical scars of their childhood since surviving a fire that nearly killed them. Years later, their estranged mother Ruby reappears with the truth about what happened and one final request. Their father was responsible and she wants her daughters to finish what he started. So the sisters climb into an old car and head across the American South hunting for a man they barely know.

Writer-director Aleshea Harris adapts her own award-winning stage play, which premiered at Soho Rep in 2018. Her original text pulled from Greek tragedy, Spaghetti Westerns, hip-hop and Afropunk, and the film keeps that collision of influences intact. What could have been a straightforward revenge thriller opens into a broader mix of Southern Gothic, road movie and black comedy, punctuated by bursts of extreme violence. There’s some KILL BILL and SINNERS in its bloodline, but Harris has her own ideas about where vengeance leads once the killing actually begins.

Kara Young and Mallori Johnson play the sisters, with Vivica A. Fox as their mother and Sterling K. Brown cast sharply against type as the father they’re hunting. Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander and Mykelti Williamson round out an unusually strong supporting cast.

IS GOD IS is funny, brutal and deliberately excessive, but underneath the revenge mechanics is a story about sisters living with the consequences of violence committed long before they had any say in it. The question isn’t simply whether they’ll find their father. It’s what carrying out somebody else’s revenge will turn them into.

18:15 Wednesday 2 September