Rage Gets Its Own Road Movie

Read Time:5 Minute, 55 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Is God Is
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Genre: Thriller, Drama, Revenge
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Aleshea Harris
Writer(s): Aleshea Harris
Cast: Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Vivica A. Fox, Sterling K. Brown, Janelle Monáe, Mykelti Williamson, Erika Alexander, Xavier Mills, Justen Ross, Josiah Cross
Where to Watch: available July 28, 2026, pre-order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: I really had no clue what to expect here. I didn’t know anything about the film going in; all I had seen were the poster and some stills. Revenge stories usually know where they’re headed long before the characters do. IS GOD IS takes a familiar route and drags it through family histories, mythic rage, dark humor, and a whole lot of fire until the path feels less like justice and more like inheritance. Aleshea Harris adapts her own stage play into a film that’s often bold, frequently strange, and carried by two lead performances that understand anger as something more complicated than an action-movie fuel source.

Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, are twin sisters whose lives have been shaped by violence before the film ever introduces them. Burns and scars mark their bodies, but Harris is more interested in what those scars have done to their sense of self, safety, and possibility. They’ve survived, but survival here doesn’t look inspirational. It looks like suspicion, codependence, and a language built between two people who’ve learned that the outside world mostly stares, mocks, or fails them.

Their mother, Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox, reenters their lives with a command that sounds like both a blessing and a curse. Find their father and make him pay. Fox doesn’t need much screen time to make Ruby feel impactful. She plays her like someone already half outside the living world, reduced physically but not spiritually. Ruby’s request isn’t framed as a calm moral decision. It’s an order from the person the sisters call God, and that choice gives the film one of its sharpest focal points. Is this justice, obedience, love, manipulation, or the final act of a woman who has nothing left but fury?

Young gives the film its spark. Racine is funny, hostile, impatient, wounded, and magnetic, sometimes all at once. She moves like someone who decided long ago that hesitation was a luxury she couldn’t afford. Young makes her dangerous without turning her into a cartoon version of toughness, letting the bravado crack just enough to show how much of it comes from fear. It’s a performance with bite and timing. Some of the film’s funniest moments land because Young knows exactly how long to let Racine enjoy her own audacity.

Johnson’s Anaia works another way, and the film needs that contrast. Anaia carries the same history with less outward coercion, which makes her easy to mistake for the passive sister until the story keeps revealing how much she’s been carrying inside. Johnson gives her quietness, not emptiness. There’s a constant negotiation happening behind her eyes, especially as the experience moves from idea to consequence. The sisters’ bond is the film’s strongest emotional bond because it’s loving without being simple. They protect each other, irritate each other, need each other, and sometimes drag each other toward choices neither one could survive alone.

Sterling K. Brown is smart casting as the father at the end of this road. He’s an actor often associated with warmth, intelligence, and morality, so the film gets an extra punch from placing him inside a character of charm and rot. Brown doesn’t overplay the menace as much as let it sit in the room. His character’s power comes from the suggestion that he has spent years convincing himself and others that violence can be buried under reinvention. That makes the confrontation less satisfying in a traditional revenge sense and more sickening in a familial one.

Mykelti Williamson brings a memorable oddness to Chuck Hall, while Erika Alexander leans into Divine with enough force to remind you where this story began. Janelle Monáe’s Angie has a more complicated place in the film, tied to the life the sisters’ father built after destroying theirs. Her scenes hint at a richer emotion behind the walls, though the film sometimes rushes through that complexity on its way to the next collision.

The framing gives the sisters room to appear isolated even when they’re side by side, and the road-movie style lets the story shift from Southern Gothic into a wider revenge-Western landscape. The use of text and private communication between the twins adds style without feeling like a gimmick. It externalizes the closeness between them while also showing how much of their lives has been lived outside the ordinary.

What makes IS GOD IS worth wrestling with is that it doesn’t lessen Racine and Anaia into symbols of victimhood alone. The film lets their rage be monstrous, funny, justified, reckless, and tragic. It understands the satisfaction of revenge stories while questioning the cost of being raised by pain until payback starts to feel like destiny. Harris doesn’t make every choice land with the same force, but the film has a pulse that’s hard to ignore.

IS GOD IS is messy in ways that sometimes weaken it and alive in ways that matter more. It’s too intriguing ever to dismiss, too uneven to overpraise, and too committed to its own world to feel like just another revenge thriller. At its best, it feels like a scream passed from mother to daughters, losing none of it as it changes hands.

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