IS GOD IS Review: Playwright-Turned-Filmmaker Aleshea Harris' Remarkably Assured Debut Dazzles, Shocks, Impresses

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a bolder, more fearless feature-length debut this year than playwright-turned-filmmaker Aleshea Harris’ uncategorizable feature-length debut, Is God Is.

 

Part righteous rampage of revenge (down, as always, with the patriarchy in all its forms), part road movie, part grindhouse allegory, Is God Is qualifies as a singular achievement in filmmaking. It’s one of one, and so, apparently, is Harris herself. Sometimes — and this is one of those times — hyperbolic superlatives are fully merited. 

 

After receiving her BA from the University of Southern Mississippi and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Harris focused her artistic talents on playwrighting. Is God Is premiered at NYC's famed Soho Repertory Theatre in February 2018, winning three Obie Awards (Playwriting, Directing, and Performance) and the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award.

 

The Pulitzer Prize Committee shortlisted Harris’ 2023 play, On Sugarland, for Drama. Eager, however, to test herself, her talents, and her skills in an entirely different medium, Harris turned to filmmaking. 

 

For Harris, challenge accepted and challenge fully met. She managed to translate her award-winning play into 100 minutes of near cinematic perfection, from the opening moments and the voiceover narration from Anaia (Mallori Johnson), a non-identical twin to Racine (two-time Tony Award-winner Kara Young), through to the film’s final, devastating scene of a survivor of domestic abuse and violence looking toward an incongruously brighter future. 

 

As children, Racine and Anaia witnessed the attempted immolation of their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), by their biological father (Sterling K. Brown), a near mythic, destructive figure identified as either a “monster” or a “man” in the credits. Shot from behind from a low angle, his face cut off by the top of the screen, Racine and Anaia’s father only appears fully in the final scenes, the culmination of their personal and geographic journey to cauterize the past by removing — or attempting to remove — their biological father from this world, ending his tyranny. 

 

When we first meet Racine and Anaia, they’re working in maintenance, cleaning offices, getting by financially, their lives stunted by a traumatic past they carry not just on their souls, but on their bodies. As a reward for selflessly trying to save her mother, Anaia was left with physical scars, including half of her face. The slower to act, Racine also suffered permanent injuries, but left her face untouched. Both are outcasts, sometimes willfully, but Racine plays protector to her taller, more introspective sister. 

 

A letter from the presumed-dead Ruby puts the sisters on the aforementioned righteous rampage of revenge through the Deep South, first to visit their mother, whom they call “God” (for birthing them into a fallen world), and later, following the meager clues left behind by their father, to a self-styled, cultish leader, Divine The Healer (Erika Alexander), and her small congregation. She keeps tokens, talismans of her brief time with Racine and Anaia’s father, suggesting her primary role, however powerful, remains subservient and subordinate to their father. 

 

Their road trip eventually reaches a terminus in their encounter with their father’s new wife (Janelle Monáe) and his two sons in a modernist, desert home. The sisters are driven by overlapping, but not identical desires: one, Racine, representing pure, unadulterated rage, the other, Anaia, representing forgiveness and compassion.

 

Their conflicting desires ultimately pull them in different, contradictory directions. Neither the inviolable promise made to their mission nor the violence that threatens to corrupt their souls, however, prepares them for their first — and last — meeting with their monstrous father.

 

Unsurprisingly, plays translated to the filmic medium tend toward static, long dialogue scenes, minimal camera movement, and even fewer editorial cuts, but Harris, showing an instinctive skill for the graphic possibilities of the cinematic form, goes in an entirely different, far more dynamic, ultimately rewarding direction. Aided immeasurably by Alexander Dynan’s compelling cinematography and Jay Rabinowitz’s efficient, energetic editing, Harris crafts an exceptionally taut, tense genre mash-up that all but announces her as one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch.