Review: Twin sisters hunt down a wayward dad in the inspired 'Is God Is'
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Playwright Aleshea Harris makes a bold cinematic debut with the screen adaptation of her Obie Award-winning play “Is God Is,” a harrowing and beautiful slice of surrealist neo-noir.Her fable depicts twin sisters on a revenge road trip, seeking to right the wrongs of their early childhood at the behest of their estranged mother and find some catharsis along the way.Tony Award-winning actress Kara Young co-stars as Racine, the mouthy, rough-and-tough twin.
Mallori Johnson plays her sister Anaia: shy, retreating and “emotional,” a descriptor that lands like an insult on her psyche.Harris introduces us to the girls in a sepia flashback, their small bodies clad in matching dresses, one head resting on the other’s shoulder.
They only have each other.When we catch up with them in the present day, the twins live a life perfectly in sync, their movements in rhythm, their telepathic communication expressed on-screen in typewriter-font subtitles.Harris also shows us the burn scars that ripple up Racine’s arm and across Anaia’s face, textured skin that makes strangers blanch, to which Racine lashes out defensively.
They live in a silo for two, sharing their pain, icing their scars.They’re psychically connected, even if they are two different sides of the same coin, Racine angry, Anaia scared.But the twins are floored and delighted to receive a letter from their long-lost mother, Ruby (Vivica A.
Fox), who is ailing and covered in burns from the same attack that scarred their bodies.She describes for them the night their father (Sterling K.
Brown) doused her in gasoline and lit a match, and dispatches her girls on a bloody mission to get revenge on a man they’ve never met.Movies If you want big popcorn fare from the best directors in the blockbuster game (Spielberg, Nolan, Ridley Scott), it’s here, along with a number of promising indie swings.Thus begins their quest d...