God (Vivica A. Fox) is dying. She writes to her estranged twin daughters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), asking them to come see her before she passes. Upon their arrival, she reveals to them the truth about the events that led to the dissolution of their family and forced the girls to grow up in foster care under the illusion that their mother had already passed and their father had abandoned them. More of a half-truth than an outright lie, God explains how her husband (Sterling K. Brown) set her on fire, leaving her and the girls covered in painful scars before walking out on them entirely. She asks, as a dying wish, that they find him and that they kill him, and that they burn down his entire world as he had burned down theirs.

Aleshea Harris writes and directs Is God Is, adapting her own 2018 stage drama of the same name, for release by Amazon MGM Pictures. The 100-minute film eschewed any spring festivals and instead took an early summer bow on just over 1,500 North American screens. Coming off of an exceptionally bloody and brutal – both in content and quality – late winter/early spring slate, the tag line “make your daddy dead. real dead.” did the film little favors, and with a title that seems more aligned with something put out by Angel Studios, Is God Is had its work cut out in courting an audience. Coupled with a minimal marketing budget, it became easy to write this film off as just another out-for-revenge picture, especially for those unfamiliar with the stage show.

Having already seen her material brought to life from the page to the stage, Harris took this story of two sisters looking to avenge their mother and bring it to the screen. Clearly with an intimate understanding of the script, she, in collaboration with cinematographer Alexander Dynan and editor Jay Rabinowitz, employs a litany of smart visual tricks and cues that make the film feel like a constant live wire as these two emotionally opposite yet perfectly complementary sisters embark on the unthinkable and unimaginable quest. There is a heavy use of split screen, but this Brian DePalma circa 1980s-favored technique has never felt more alive than it does here. Additionally, the use of subtitles when the sisters are communicating telepathically with each other is not confined to the bottom center of the screen; rather, it takes on the form of concrete poetry so that the size, shape, placement, and alignment of the text all help to add more emotion to the scene. Beyond this, though, the use of color is most incredible throughout the film, with certain shades of blue and red from Angelina Vitto’s costumes really popping, but also the strange color quality used in the few flashbacks that is some unsettling mix of grey and almost-green where the white of the father’s teeth cut through the smoke and haze borrowing a favored horror trope where only the whites of the eyes or the teeth are visible from the shadows.

To frame this film as a quest is no hyperbole, either, as the film treats this journey with almost mythic importance. When they arrive at their mother’s home, she is seated in the center of the room as if on a throne while her nurse aids tend to her like handmaidens to a queen. The first stop of their odyssey takes them to the humble temple of a false priestess, Divine (Erika Alexander), and her son, Ezekiel (Josiah Cross). Later, after following the promptings of Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson), a rendered-mute lawyer who loosely fills the archetype of the wise old blind man, they are hunted by a “monster” – cyclops, minotaur, it is not particularly important for the broad strokes of the metaphor to still work – in a labyrinthian construction zone, and upon escaping the sisters then embark across the fields of the southeast. The images on screen call back memories of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a comic retelling of Homer’s epic by Joel and Ethan Coen, also set in the American South. While Racine and Anaia’s story is not as cleanly a transposition from the ancient tale, each new setting and character they contend with are treated with the same gravitas as legend, and none such as strongly as Angie (Janelle Monáe), a rival queen in a vast white palace where she lives with her twin boys, Scotch and Riley (Xavier Mills, Justen Ross), and the man that the sisters were sent to kill.

At its core, Is God Is rides on the back of Young and Johnson, who have been set up for success by Harris and her crafts team, and it is a responsibility that the two actors do not shy away from. Their performances are as unique as they are singular, with each of the sisters perfectly complementing the other while remaining fiercely individual. The script clearly telegraphs that a transformation is in store for the more mild-mannered Anaia pretty early on, so some of the supporting business in the middle act does feel like a bit of a drag on the otherwise focused and forward-moving story, but how Harris chooses to ultimately end her revenge narrative offers some real surprises. While Johnson is asked to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting in her role, it allows Young as Racine to really lean into her bombastic charm and accelerate each and every situation the twins come across with a fiery, take-no-prisoners attitude. In the showier role, she creates a great foil to her sister, but Young is also able to step aside for God, and to keep with the metaphor, Brown’s Satan-esque role which allows both his and Fox’s gravitas to shape the world of the film. Through the unfolding nature of the story, Brown does loom more immediately over the action that transpires, and while it would be nice to see more of a push/pull between him and Fox, on a character level, Racine and Anaia are acting as her crusaders, so her will is never not being done.

Is God Is is a towering work and an incredible feature debut for Harris. With its roots on the stage, some of that identity spills over onto the screen, not in the usual way – a single location, long monologues, relatively stationary camera – but in the way Harris structures her pages, directs her actors, and guides the camera and the edit; it requires in audiences a similar leap into the surreal that is often reserved for the stage. There is a forced artificiality in what we are seeing, not in a fantastic sense, but rather we are witnessing real life through the slight distortion of the proscenium arch, or in this case through the distortion of the camera lens. Harris pushes the envelope in the final act with a sprinkling of magic realism that may, in the immediate, turn off an audience attracted to the in-the-trenches approach her story has taken thus far, but when Is God Is is reframed again as the modern myth that it clearly is, these flourishes are as natural as the dust and the ash that occupies so much of this film.