A little girl sits still on a playground bench. Another one, smaller but dressed similarly, sidles next to her and places a head on her shoulder. At the start of “Is God Is,” the fraternal twins Anaia and Racine have their backs to us, but their physical intimacy and even their nascent dynamics radiate from the get-go in the playwright Aleshea Harris’s powerhouse film directorial debut.
As the camera edges toward the girls, a boy comes into the frame, stops and stares at Anaia. The smaller girl stands, picks up a piece of wood and follows him out of the frame. If the boy’s offscreen comeuppance puts you in mind of the Greek habit — no, not Alpha Kappa Alphas, but Sophocles — of taking violence offstage, it should.
Harris wrote her award-winning play about domestic violence and revenge with that epic tradition in mind. For her screen adaptation, she wields muscular magic in transporting Racine and Anaia’s revenge saga (which premiered in 2018 at Soho Rep in Manhattan) to the actual open road, one of American cinema’s favorite destinations. It’s a journey that begins with a letter from “God,” or more precisely, Racine and Anais’s mother, Ruby, portrayed by Vivica A. Fox.
Having survived the foster care system, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), now 21, live on their own in a railroad apartment in the Northeast. They had believed their mother was killed in the flames that engulfed them when they were three — a conflagration ignited by their father, here known as Man (Sterling K. Brown). Racine has horrible scars on her arms, back and neck. Anaia’s face, neck and arms are latticed with burns. When their mother summons them, the twins hop into their brown Oldsmobile Cutlass and head to the Dirty South to meet her.
In this vivid fable of familial trauma, bodies are not the only thing keeping score. When the twins arrive at a modest care center and pull back green sheer curtains to enter their mother’s room, they might’ve looked at the camera and said, “we’re not in Realism anymore.” Ruby is propped on a bed, surrounded by nurse’s aides, an I.V. drip nearby. Even wearing a facial compression mask to cover her burns, Ruby is regal. She is a vision; a queen attended to. It’s hard not to smirk with pleasure watching Fox, who played Vernita Green in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge ride “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” setting off this insta-classic of payback. In a sepia-tinted scene that is horror-flick unnerving, Ruby recounts the night of Man’s attack. “Make your Daddy dead. Real dead,” she tells her daughters.
Harris has a sure grasp of the stakes of Greek tragedy but also antes up with Afropunk flourishes and spaghetti western nods. Those were the brazenly fun gestures critics pointed out when the play premiered. But more movingly and less acknowledged is the fact that “Is God Is,” in spirit if not practice, also invokes a Black literary matriarchal lineage. If Racine and Anaia could issue a triumphant shout-out, they might raise their fists and yell, “This one’s for Pecola!,” referencing the heartbreaking abused child in Toni Morrison’s debut novel, “The Bluest Eye.”
“Is God Is,” is epic to its core, and, clocking in at a little over an hour and a half, surprisingly fleet. Each stop in Anaia and Racine’s road trip toward retribution has its own winking character (the production design is by Freyja Bardell). There’s the white clapboard house that is now a Black church. This one is lorded over by the charismatic preacher named Divine (Erika Alexander). She’s a painful contradiction: She has sway over her congregation, but has built an altar to the twin’s father. Years ago, Man left her and their not-yet-born son, Ezekiel, who is now a young man (Josiah Cross). The ways in which a strong woman can be complicit and then compromised, or worse, by Man is a theme throughout.
At a storefront lawyer’s wood-paneled office, the twins find a broken defense attorney, Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson). He scribbles his responses to the twin’s interrogation on a small dry-erase board because although he got Man acquitted, Hall didn’t escape his client’s easy cruelty. Hall’s information will send the twins to a spotless, low-slung McMansion in a desert called the Valley where Man has ensconced with yet another family: his wife Angie (Janelle Monáe) and their teenage twins, Scotch (Xavier Mills) and Riley (Justen Ross).
Brown makes himself at ease as a cigarillo smoking, smooth-talking monster. For much of the movie, we see only Man’s mouth accompanied by his Quiet Storm cadence. How seductive is he? When Man finally offers his counter to Ruby’s story of that fateful night years ago, it sounds credible. Almost.
From its start in the Northeast to its journey west to the Valley, the movie’s geography is intentionally vague. What is vividly specific are Young’s and Johnson’s performances. Young (who made Tony Awards history with back-to-back wins) relishes Racine’s rage. The rock-filled tube sock she brandishes grows increasingly red. Beneath the cooled lava flow of Anaia’s facial scars, Johnson signals ache, fear, as well as compassion, with her glances and hushed voice. Together, the actors achieve a symbiotic feat that is, by turns, harrowing, hilarious and fundamentally heart-rending.
It is also philosophically rich. “You ever wanna scrape your scars off and see what’s underneath?” Racine asks her twin. What better way for a film to embody the tussle between conscience and fury than in a conversation between inseparable twins? “We ain’t killers,” Anaia insists to Racine more than once. “How you figure that?” Racine replies. “We come from a man who tried to kill our mama and a mama who wants to kill that man. Iss in the blood.”
“Is God Is” is nimble with its pleasures and assured in its gravity. Along with her editors (Jay Rabinowitz and Blair McClendon) and her cinematographer (Alexander Dynan), Harris leaves few creative stones unturned. Intertitles capture telepathic exchanges. Characters provide their own introductions in voice-over. Split screens amplify the mirroring of the sisters. So intentional are Harris’s choices that you might find yourself straining to decipher even the lyrics of songs playing in the background, certain that they, like a libretto, move the saga forward and deeper. (The score is by Joseph Shirley and Moses Sumney.)
Early in the movie, Racine wears a T-shirt with the words “Listen to Hear” emblazoned on it. That koan-like phrase becomes a splinter of poetry to keep mulling. “Is God Is” asks us to pay heed — in ways subtle and bold — to its comedy and anguish. It demands, without seeming to, that we watch to see, really see.
Is God Is Rated R for bloody violence and strong language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
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