I live in a majority Black neighborhood in a majority Black city with its very own four-screen cinema just a few bus stops away from my front porch. In the decade or so since that theater has opened, this week is the first instance I’ve ever noticed that the majority of the movies on that cinema’s marquee were helmed by Black directors and Black leads, which suggests that we’re currently experiencing a notable cultural moment in film distribution, at least partially encouraged by last year’s box office success for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Of the three Black-led, Black-directed films screening at The Broad this week, Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is lands the closest to Sinners territory, at least in comparison to Antoine Fuqua’s amoral nostalgia-bait biopic Michael and Boots Riley’s lefty heist comedy I Love Boosters. Is God Is is a dusty, Southern-fried genre flick shot on location on the rural backroads of Louisiana, and thus the project of the trio that most likely benefited from Sinners‘s success. Much like Sinners, it’s also a film that’s more satisfying when it’s setting the stage for its violent climactic showdown than it is when actually depicting that violence, when its tension is supposed to be relieved through cathartic action. In both cases, it’s a fun ride getting there, regardless of the payoffs found at their predetermined destinations.
Aleshea Harris’s feature film debut feels like a natural evolution from her background as a playwright. It’s packed with compelling characters staging a series of standalone showdowns in single-location scenes, each linked via road trip montage. This structure allows formidable actors like Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, and (fresh off her hilarious turn in The Rise & Fall of Reggie Dinkins) Erika Alexander to make major impact with just a few minutes of screentime, rigidly sectioned off in their own hermetic realms. Each of those name-brand performers go toe-to-toe with the film’s up-and-comer leads: Kara Young & Mallori Johnson as telepathically linked twins on a familial revenge mission across the American South. After having essentially raised each other from foster home to foster home, the two young adults are enlisted by their estranged mother (Fox) to kill their even more estranged, abusive father (Brown) in retaliation for heartlessly setting his family on fire, leaving all three women horribly scarred & disfigured. The feistier twin (Young) is excited to be offered a path to tangible retribution & closure, while the kinder twin (Johnson) struggles to hold her sister on a leash, hoping to resolve the violence of the past without exacting further violence in the present. Because this is a revenge thriller, neither kindness nor forgiveness prevail.
Is God Is is funny, stylish, and cool in surprising ways. The twins’ lifelong social isolation resulting from their visible disfigurement has left them intensely strange & mutually obsessed, like a couple of Nells (or, more appropriately, like Letitia Wright’s titular dual role in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins). Harris’s stage theatre background shows in the screenplay’s more allegorical touches, categorizing the twins’ oppositional parents as a small-town showdown between God (Fox) and The Devil (Brown) in a temporally ambiguous, sepiatone version of The South. Between the leads’ volatile sisterly chemistry and the anything-goes chaos of the otherworldly setting, the movie quickly establishes a distinct style & mood despite the familiarity of its road-trip revenge mission genre template. The major letdown, then, is that it doesn’t also deliver on the built-in genre payoffs of that template. Harris proves to be just as weary to get her hands dirty in the film’s violent action as the softer of her two protagonists. We know her characters are doing violent things; they are brutally killing each other with lit matches, rusty gardening sheers, and Biblically-accurate rocks. The movie is just disappointingly squeamish about actually depicting that ultraviolence onscreen instead of just hinting at it. We almost always see the aftermath instead of the point of impact, as if the producers were seeking a PG-13 rating that the crasser lines of Harris’s dialogue were never going to allow.
The most convincingly violent Is God Is gets is in the ice-cold tone of Sterling K. Brown’s villainous performance, suggesting a sociopathic level of cruelty the onscreen action is too timid to match. This is ultimately a very warm, sentimental story about two socially isolated women who only have each other in this otherwise cruel world; it hides all of the nastier business of smashed skulls, burnt flesh, and pierced lungs behind visual obstacles, shielding the audience from the full brunt of impact. This disparity between the level of violence demanded by the genre and the level of violence depicted on the screen calls into question whether Harris was actually interested in making a revenge thriller in particular, or if that screenplay was just the easiest to fundraise production funds for, as opposed to a dialogue-heavy drama. Then again, the last time I remember complaining about this kind of violence-averse squeamishness was in Nia DaCosta’s (otherwise compelling) Candyman reboot, and she later doubled down on horror’s mandatory violent catharsis in the excellent 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Maybe Harris is working her way up to soaking in the bloodbaths demanded by her scripts’ chosen genres. Maybe she’ll be able to leverage the attention earned by this flashy debut to instead pivot away from genre requirements entirely. Either way, this is an undeniably cool calling-card introduction of an exciting authorial voice to the moviegoing audience, and its wide theatrical distribution is an encouraging sign for where the industry is headed.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 