There was a time, not even that long ago, when the movies felt like a sacred place. You bought the ticket, found the sticky seat in the dark, and surrendered yourself to the possibility that for two hours somebody might actually show you something new. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but I grew up believing cinema was where lunatics, geniuses, and weirdos gathered to confess things. Movies once felt dangerous. Even the bad ones had ambition. Especially the bad ones. A terrible movie made by someone swinging for the fences is still more alive than the antiseptic sludge currently wheezing out of most major studios like content from a dying fax machine.
These days, though, walking into a multiplex feels less like entering a cathedral and more like wandering through the refrigerated section of a Costco. Everything is packaged. Everything is branded. Every third poster features either a man in a cape staring at the sky as if he’s misplaced his car keys or a dinosaur roaring at civilians who continue, after thirty years of evidence, to insist on visiting dinosaur parks. And look, I’m tired. I’m morally tired. Spiritually tired. Franchise tired. “This character will return” tired.
I can no longer pretend to care about interconnected cinematic universes that require homework assignments and flowcharts. Somewhere along the line, movies stopped being movies and started behaving like quarterly business reports. Even the actors seem exhausted. Half of them are promoting crypto, the other half are treating late-night interviews like congressional hearings. Every release arrives with discourse already attached to it like a parasite.
So yes, perhaps I approached Is God Is with the desperation of a man stranded in the desert hallucinating an oasis shaped like originality. And that trailer for Is God Is? Good lord.
The trailer for Is God Is hit me like finding a cigarette machine in a synagogue basement. Suddenly there was style again. There was energy. And there was most certainly danger. It promised a revenge story centered on twin sisters hunting down the father who abused and burned them alive as children, leaving them scarred physically and psychologically while their mother, equally destroyed, sends them across America to finish the job. It looked gritty and theatrical in the best possible way. The music thumped. The dialogue snapped. Everybody in the trailer moved like they knew they were inside a movie instead of a licensing agreement.
For two glorious minutes, it appeared as though writer-director Aleshea Harris had created a grindhouse revenge flick somewhere between Quentin Tarantino, early Guy Ritchie, and the blood-spattered poetry of Martin Scorsese. It looked like vengeance with personality. It promised violence with purpose. The kind of movie where people monologue before shootings and every diner waitress secretly carries a revolver in her purse.
Needless to say I was all in. And perhaps that’s why the actual film felt less like disappointment and more like discovering the restaurant forgot to cook your steak but served it anyway with confidence. Because Is God Is does not merely fail to deliver on the promises of its trailer, it practically holds those promises hostage and demands ransom.
The most heartbreaking detail is that A24 once had distribution rights to the film before quietly stepping away, allowing Amazon MGM Studios to inherit the project. That fact hangs over the movie like an omen. A24, the studio that routinely releases emotionally devastating movies about grief, witchcraft, anxiety, codependency, hereditary trauma, and occasionally all five at once, watched this thing and apparently decided, “No thank you, we’re good.” Which is a little like your mechanic refusing to test-drive your car because he’d rather not die.
The film follows Racine and Anaia, twin sisters played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson. One is “the rough one,” the other “the quiet one,” which is the sort of shorthand characterization that sounds less like writing and more like labels on shampoo bottles. Both actresses are committed, and you can see flashes of a much better movie trapped inside their performances, clawing at the walls trying to escape. But Harris’s screenplay is so obsessed with sounding stylized that it forgets human beings are supposed to speak the dialogue.
Every line arrives dipped in neon marker, begging the audience to applaud how cool it sounds. Characters don’t converse so much as audition for cult status. The problem is that coolness cannot survive in a vacuum. Tarantino’s dialogue works because beneath all the riffs and digressions there’s character psychology humming underneath. His people talk strangely because they are strange. Here, the dialogue feels reverse-engineered from somebody who watched Kill Bill at 2 A.M. and confused aesthetic mimicry for voice.
And so the sisters wander through the movie searching for their father while very little actually happens. They twerk. They encounter cartoonish jerks. They trade pseudo-profound observations that land with the weight of an Instagram caption written by somebody who owns too many scented candles.
For nearly an hour and ten minutes, the film stalls in place like a car spinning its tires in mud. Then, whenever violence finally erupts, it’s staged with such baffling incompetence that scenes intended to feel dangerous instead become unintentionally hilarious. Action geography disappears entirely. Characters teleport around rooms. Punches miss by visible inches. One sequence feels less like revenge cinema and more like community theater attempting a Robert Rodriguez tribute after three margaritas.
At the center of all this is “The Monster,” the girls’ father, played by Sterling K. Brown, who at least possesses the gravity to make you sit up whenever he appears. The movie clearly wants this confrontation to function like the showdown between The Bride and Bill in Kill Bill, the climactic moment where the monster explains himself and the audience wrestles with the uglier corners of revenge.
But that comparison only highlights how catastrophically Is God Is misunderstands what made Kill Bill work. Bill’s monologue mattered because Tarantino understood contradiction. Bill was monstrous, selfish, cruel, and yet recognizably human. His explanation didn’t excuse his behavior. It complicated it. Harris, meanwhile, seems convinced that merely withholding information counts as depth. The film attempts a late-game swerve concerning the origins of the family trauma, but the revelation lands with all the dramatic force of discovering your hotel continental breakfast has run out of bagels.
Nothing deepens. Nothing recontextualizes. The movie simply lurches toward an ending so predictable and emotionally flat that I sat there wondering if perhaps the true revenge was the runtime itself. And what a shame that is.
Because beneath all the posturing there are themes worth exploring. Whether the violence becomes hereditary, whether forgiveness is moral cowardice or emotional liberation, whether abused children ever truly escape the architecture of their pain. But the film treats these ideas like decorative accessories instead of emotional foundations. Harris is so consumed with making the movie feel cool that she neglects the boring but necessary machinery of storytelling, which is character, pacing, coherence, consequence. Style without substance is perfume on roadkill.
Which brings me back to that trailer, the glorious liar of a trailer. It belongs in a museum dedicated to false advertising. Somewhere between the trailer for Suicide Squad and every movie where Jared Leto appears to be having a much better time than the audience.
Watching Is God Is feels like being promised a handmade meal by a celebrated chef and instead receiving an expired Lunchable thrown directly at your face.
Maybe that’s why the disappointment stung so much. It’s not just that the movie is bad. Plenty of movies are bad. Bad movies can be fascinating. Bad movies can become beloved. This one is worse becasue it’s hollow. It mistakes imitation for inspiration. It wants the mythology of revenge cinema without understanding why revenge stories resonate in the first place.
And perhaps that’s the state of modern filmmaking in miniature. So many movies now feel assembled from references instead of observations about actual life. They’re built from other movies, other aesthetics, and other moments that once worked somewhere else. Cinema has become a snake eating its own intellectual property.
Which means I’ll continue waiting, probably foolishly, for the next movie that surprises me. The next film made by somebody with a pulse instead of a marketing strategy. Until then, feel free to skip Is God Is entirely. The trailer already gave you the best version of the movie you’re ever going to see.
