Interview: Aleshea Harris, Kara Young & Mallori Johnson on ‘Is God Is’
Few debuts arrive with as singular and assured a voice as Aleshea Harris‘ Is God Is. An acclaimed, Obie Award-winning playwright making her feature-length directorial debut, Harris adapts her own 2018 stage play into a striking, genre-bending revenge thriller that fuses Southern Gothic, Western, and pitch-black comedy into something wholly its own. Produced by Tessa Thompson and Janicza Bravo, and boasting a stacked ensemble that includes Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander, Vivica A. Fox, Mykelti Williamson, Josiah Cross, and Sterling K. Brown, Is God Is announces Harris as a bold new filmmaking voice with a vision all her own.
Is God Is follows twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), who, along with their mother, survived a fire set by their abusive father years ago, leaving all three women with significant scars both physical and emotional. When their dying mother (Vivica A. Fox) summons them with a single, devastating directive — to find the man who set them ablaze and make him pay — the sisters embark on a violent, mythic quest for vengeance that forces them to reckon with a haunting family history and the question of just how much of their father’s brutality lives on within them.
At its core, Is God Is is a film about inheritance — of trauma, of rage, of blood — but it’s also a film that grants its Black women characters something rarely afforded to them onscreen: the full, uncompromised measure of their humanity. It’s a quality Harris was acutely conscious of, and intentional about, throughout the writing process. “I know the rules for being a Black woman and a Black girl, which is that the dictates of respectability are that you have to conduct yourself in a certain way, you have to hold things down, and you shouldn’t show your anger,” she explains. “And I think that that’s dehumanizing, which is part of the reason that I allow these women the full measure of their humanity. Allowed them to get messy, allowed them their rage, which for me was restorative and healing, to say, ‘No, actually, you have reasons to be angry, and you can express that anger. It’s a perfectly human emotion.’ So I knew that that line was there, and I was intentionally stepping over it.”
Translating that complexity from stage to screen, however, was no small feat for Harris, who approached the adaptation with both ambition and care. “It was challenging, I have to say. It was a lot of trial and error, because when I started out, I didn’t have a lot of experience writing for the screen,” she admits. “So I needed to understand the rules and the ways that I could maximize the story by way of what’s accessible through the screen. So it was really just trying to find the rhythm, but also maintaining the poetry and the soul of the play and trying to take care of it, so that it would translate and the uniqueness of the play could shine through the movie.”
Central to the film’s emotional power is the relationship between Racine and Anaia, a pair of twins who share everything and yet move through the world in fundamentally different ways. To build that bond, both Young and Johnson credit Harris with a crucial early decision: bringing the two of them together long before cameras ever rolled. “I think it started with Aleshea doing something really, really smart, which was bringing us in early before we even started filming to work together in a studio,” recalls Johnson. “It’s like a dance studio. And we did a series of exercises where we kind of were moving with each other. And we would look in the mirror and try to read what the other person was thinking and finish each other’s sentences.”
For Johnson, those exercises became the foundation of a relationship that extended far beyond the page. “The relationship that I formed with Kara as a person began there,” she continues. “You just start to imagine what it would be like if you had this partner in life who you relied on for everything, and that takes you somewhere else, and then that takes you somewhere else, and then you start to understand why they need each other and why they feel responsible for each other. It was just constant dialogue between me and Kara. We would work on it literally every single day prior to shooting. We would just meet in the hotel, because we were living in the same hotel, and talk about who we were and where we came from and why we needed the things we needed. And we built that together.”
That intimacy translated directly to the screen, particularly in the way the sisters’ physical scars become an extension of their bond, marking them as viscerally, inextricably connected. “Once we were on set with our makeup, our burns were very different, which also added another layer of what it means to connect, and how we are literally viscerally connected,” explains Young, who describes her character Racine as the more outwardly “normal-looking, presenting person” of the two — the one who carries and represents her sister out in the world. “I could only think of the weights that we both carry and what we’re both holding. What’s the thing that’s out versus the thing that’s in? But our preparation for that life, for the life onscreen, was very intense, and also quite beautiful and magical, to achieve twin-like ways in the film.”
Elsewhere, the film’s moral landscape only grows more complicated through its supporting characters, chief among them Angie, the new wife played by Janelle Monáe, who initially appears to be just another victim of the family’s monstrous patriarch before revealing far thornier dimensions. It’s a character Harris and Monáe worked to render with deliberate, uncomfortable complexity. “Janelle was a joy to work with. She was so game to play Angie, and we talked a lot on the front end about that very complexity,” says Harris. “What does it mean that this person who is a survivor turns around and victimizes other people? This person who is oppressed is now playing oppressor. It’s a conversation about class that we see happening, a conversation about conventional beauty, and a conversation just about a woman who has more resources, who looks down once she’s challenged by these women who she thinks are beneath her. Something erupts, which I think is delicious, I think is absolutely true to life. We spoke about the need for both of those versions or sides of Angie to be played with authenticity, and she nailed it.”
Just as carefully considered is the film’s remarkable sound design, which uses sound, music, and even silence to extraordinary effect, often deploying audio to suggest acts of violence rather than depicting them outright. For Harris, it was all a matter of intention. “I think I just wanted to communicate to them what was important. In each moment, when we hear someone’s shoes walking across the floor — what does that do? What should the quality of that be? What is the shoe that they’re wearing?” she explains. “There’s something to be said about a change, when you’re doing something and there’s a shift. So if you’ve had a lot of silence, what does it mean to now introduce sound? What should that sound be?”
That approach proved especially vital in handling the film’s depictions of violence against women, which Harris was determined never to render gratuitously. “I really wanted to use sound for some of the acts of violence,” she says. “I didn’t want to show them straight on, didn’t want to just have onscreen this horrible thing happening to a woman especially, so it made sense to activate other senses, and sound is a really powerful one.”
The result is a debut of rare confidence and vision, a film that takes a sharp, uncompromising knife to questions of trauma, vengeance, and the humanity afforded — or denied — to Black women, all while heralding the arrival of an exciting new filmmaking voice in Aleshea Harris. It’ll undoubtedly be fascinating to see what she does next.
Is God Is is now playing in theaters.