Racine and Anaia are sent on a quest by their mother—a woman they had long thought killed in a family tragedy. “Make your daddy dead,” she asks them. Many, many people die (in pretty bloody ways) in this clever but vacuous story of revenge. Sensuality, drug use and language further mar the picture. Oh, and the “God” in the title? The twins consider their mom to be their god. So there’s that.
Racine and Anaia have each other. And not much else.
As children, the twins suffered horrific burns when their house went up in flames—a tragedy that took away their mother, too. A series of foster homes followed, each one worse than the last. And now that they’re on their own, they make do. The sisters work together, eat together, live together. They’re so close that they’re telepathic, sharing thoughts even as they’re brushing their teeth.
But twins or no, they’re not identical. Anaia’s the quiet one, the gentle one. Scars mar her face, and if she was alone, she’d endure the inevitable taunts and insults in stoic silence. Racine won’t have it though. Brash and braying, she’ll tear into anyone who dares call her sister “ugly.”
Sure, life’s been tough. But no matter what comes, Racine and Anaia know they have each other’s backs. Always have, always will. Til death do they part.
And then comes the letter, down from the Dirty South. Their mother—the woman they’d thought was dead—is alive, if not quite well. She asks Anaia and Racine to visit her. She’s got a job for them.
When Anaia and Racine arrive, their mother unfurls what happened that horrible night all those years ago—memories the girls had forgotten or discarded. The twins’ father (known only as the Man) choked their mother into unconsciousness, threw her in a bathtub and poured gasoline over her body. He turned to Racine and Anaia and said, “Let’s wake Mommy up.”
And then he lit a match.
The Man lit a blunt and stood in the doorway as the girls tried to save their mother, suffering those horrible burns. A court trial later somehow absolved him, and he walked away—free in body, mind and spirit.
And that won’t do, the twins’ mother believes. Won’t do at all.
“Make your daddy dead,” she says. “And everything around him, you can destroy that, too.”
Anaia would rather not pursue this blood-soaked quest. Killing is wrong … right? But Racine’s all for it. Their father deserves to die. Plus, when you think about it, their mother is, well, “God.” She made them, didn’t she? And if she’s God, that would simply make them the hands of God, Racine reasons. Nothing wrong with that.
So, of course, there’s plenty wrong with that. And most of the movie’s “positive elements” come with caveats. But here’s what we’ve got.
It’s nice that Racine and Anaia care so much for each other, and that they’ll defend and protect each other. (But we’d encourage that love and protection stop short of cold-blooded murder.)
We should also give Anaia some props for being the kindest character in Is God Is. When Racine wants to gun the gas of her own metaphorical murder car, Anaia’s the one to pump the brakes. At one juncture, Anaia even threatens to walk away from Racine entirely if Racine sheds any more blood (other than their father’s). And Anaia also shows kindness to a couple of the movie’s villains: The movie doesn’t reward her for it, of course. It’s not that kind of movie. But I would say that, as a general rule, we should give folks the benefit of the doubt.
Racine and Anaia regularly refer to their mother as “God” from the moment they learn that she’s alive. “You ready to see God?” Racine asks Anaia as they set out on their quest, for instance. They certainly don’t see their mom as an all-powerful deity, but they do see her as their own “creator,” and they see their mission as a sacred quest of sorts.
And that’s an important thing to note in context. Is God Is consciously takes the structure of a classic hero’s journey. Often in Greek mythology, a story’s protagonist would be called into action by a deity, and Is God Is wants to echo those classical myths—putting Racine and Anaia into the shoes of Bellerophon or Heracles. (It may be worth noting that twins often factor into mythological tales, sometimes representing cosmic duality. Racine and Anaia’s very different personalities seem to add credence to that potential interpretation as well.)
The twins’ first stop in this quest lands at the doorstep of “The Holy House of the Conqueror,” a religious community headed by a faith healer named Divine, who had a running affair with Racine and Anaia’s father. We see her lead her adherents in a raucous, charismatic service that involves standing, waving and fainting. A crude picture of Jesus wrestling a lion or demon is painted on the wall. One of Divine’s followers encourages the twins to allow themselves to be baptized by Divine: Their scars will disappear, she promises.
Divine’s “faith,” however, seems divided. Other houses of faith may include a cabinet where we might expect to find the Torah or the consecrated hosts used in Holy Communion. In Divine’s Holy House of the Conqueror, that cabinet is filled with the stuff the twins’ father left behind when he walked out on Divine: a shirt, a stick of deodorant, etc. It’s all reverentially arranged, and Divine says that it’ll be ready for the Man’s inevitable return.
Divine’s son is named Ezekiel, and he sometimes invokes the Bible. We hear references to prayer. The twins sometimes engage in telepathy.
Racine and Anaia are mistaken for strippers at one juncture, hired to apparently entertain a group of guys (some of whom may be underage). To buy time, they decide to “perform,” and we see them dance erotically in lingerie.
Anaia fantasizes about what her life would have been like if her face hadn’t been so horrifically burned: She imagines herself having sex with someone in a car. (We don’t see anything critical, but we do see some movement.) Anaia has had some lovers, though, and she’s currently pregnant by one of them. (Racine wonders aloud why Anaia’s breasts seem to have grown, and she then surmises the truth.)
We learn that the Man fathered a child with Divine after attempting to murder his family. Anaia and Racine wear bikini tops, tight shorts and other revealing outfits. We hear about sexual relationships and positions. When someone asks the Man why he set the twins’ mother on fire, he answers, “She wouldn’t let me hold her.”
The Man is an abusive, violent creature. The twins’ mom flashes back to some of the abuse she experienced at his hands, including when he pulled her by the hair, dragged her across the floor and choked her. His current wife is obviously terrified of the Man, too, cleaning and scrubbing their shared house and even arranging the man’s hats to his exacting specifications. The Man tells his daughter that he’d like to pluck her eyeballs out of her head and make her eat them.
But the Man’s abuse extends beyond the domestic: When the twins meet the lawyer who kept the Man out of jail, they discover that the Man literally ripped out the lawyer’s tongue once their business was concluded. (Audiences won’t see that particular scene, but they will see the Man slam the lawyer’s head into a steering wheel and, later, see the car’s windshield covered in blood.)
In that respect, Racine seems to have some of her daddy in her. She seems to grow fond of violence, and that taste for blood permeates the carnage we see.
Someone crushes someone else’s larynx with a rock stuffed in a sock. (The victim holds his throat and soon coughs up huge amounts of blood.) A woman gets beaten to death with the same sort of weapon. (Only one blow is seen on screen, with the rest hidden by an SUV.) A character gets stabbed with a pair of hedge trimmers and falls into a pool, filling it with blood. In addition to the twins’ mom, two other characters are immolated. Characters get into a massive fight involving fists and rocks and feet. It culminates with one of the combatants slipping in a pool of blood.
The lawyer, expecting the Man to return and try to kill him, hires a woman every week to beat him up. It’s apparently not for sexual gratification (though the woman does dress rather skimpily), but rather to get him used to experiencing pain. We see him endure one of these weekly beatdowns. Later, it comes in handy when one of the twins smacks him in the face with a rock.
A motorcycle driver smashes Racine and Anaia’s car engine with a hammer, and he threatens to do the same to the twins. Characters pass out after getting. In a flashback, a young Racine stalks off camera to beat up a few kids who called Anaia ugly. (We hear their squeals of pain.) Some of the twins’ foster fathers were physically or sexually abusive.
The twins’ mother is scarred from head to toe. When her girls seem to balk at the idea of killing their father, she tells them to look at her legs: We don’t see what they look like onscreen, but the twins are apparently disgusted enough that they have no further qualms about killing the Man.
Nearly 15 f-words (some paired with the word “mother”) and around 25 s-words. We also hear several uses of “a–” and “b–ch,” along with a few of “d–n” and “h—.”
The twins’ mother smokes a marijuana blunt, telling the girls it’s for the pain. The Man (and at least one of his sons) smokes marijuana. We see liquor and beer bottles.
Before they take off on their quest, Racine and Anaia have a conversation in their shared bathroom as Racine urinates. During the quest, the two sometimes urinate by the side of the road, often facing each other and talking as they do their business. The Man’s new wife urinates into a bottle—apparently hoping that her husband will drink it.
Racine steals something from Divine. Someone spits in Racine’s face. People can be rude and cruel to the twins, especially to Anaia.
Secular reviews for writer/director Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is have been positively glowing. This blend of a Grecian-inflected epic with Western tropes and Afropunk sensibilities has earned a 98% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and wowed many a critic.
But not this one.
I get what Is God Is wants to do—or, at least, some of it. But from Plugged In’s perspective, it’s hard to get past the whole “let’s kill everyone who’s wronged us and maybe some folks who haven’t” element of the story. This film is a bloody, tawdry, sensationalist mess of a movie, and we haven’t even touched on the twins’ blasphemous take on their mother.
For all its epic pretensions, Is God Is feels hollow and half-made; a revenge thriller painted with merely the trappings of classical heft. Its strong language and brazen grotesquerie can’t hide its vacuous ethics—nor does it even want to try. This film is meant for the Freudian id. And for this reviewer, that’s a film that fails.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
