Writer-director Aleshea Harris talks adapting her Black Southern Gothic play into a star-studded thriller — and getting Beyoncé’s support

What’s that famous saying about hell hath no fury? Well, keep the woman scorned and add  two scarred twins sent on a bloody odyssey to kill the father who maimed them and you’re just at the precipice of capturing all the gory, raucous intrigue of Is God Is. 

“This is an epic family drama where the blood flies. I very intentionally wanted it to feel like an effed-up fairy tale,” says writer-director Aleshea Harris, who adapted the film from her hit 2018 off-Broadway play of the same name. “While I think it invites real conversations about femicide, mental abuse, trauma, and what seeking revenge cost the revenge seeker, it also holds the catharsis [of seeing] Black women’s rage center-stage, without apology.” 

Is God Is (out now) follows fraternal twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) as they transform from down-on-their-luck orphans to newly claimed daughters with a righteous mission. Both are burned from a house fire their father (Sterling K. Brown) started, one they believe killed their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox). When an out-of-the-blue letter reveals their mother is in fact alive, barely, they take on her deathbed mantle: to “make your daddy dead.” The twins must journey through a gothic version of the Deep South, tracking down another broken family their father left in his wake, to try and exact revenge. But how far is too far? 

The film features a stacked cast of heavyweights and up-and-comers: in addition to Brown, Fox, and Young you’ll see Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander, and Mykelti Williamson. But behind the scenes, it took a network of Black creatives — including Beyoncé — becoming obsessed with this story for it to make it to the screen. Its journey began shortly after Harris won the 2018 Obie Award (the off-Broadway version of the Tonys) for Playwriting. (She is also a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama.) Several Hollywood production companies were initially interested, but the Covid pandemic in 2020 shut down most of those conversations. Then Harris found champions in Tessa Thompson (Hedda, Creed, Thor: Ragnarok) and Janicza Bravo, the director of the viral Twitter thread turned film Zola. “These women were the gears in the machine to make it go,” Harris says.

But even as the author of a fiery story about ownership and power, Harris had to go through her own learning process to embody some of the themes present in her work. At the time, she had developed the screenplay and was looking for a director. It took a nudge from playwright Jeremy O. Harris for her to realize the answer might be looking at her in the mirror. 

“Jeremy said to me, ‘Look, you should direct this. This is your story,’” Harris recounts. “It was like a switch being flipped. I had been a very bossy playwright with a lot of ideas about how my work should happen and it felt like the natural next step for my journey as an artist.” 

That choice became key to some of the film’s biggest wins. Harris thought casting giant names around two lesser-known actors would add to the story’s sense of mythic proportions. “I thought that juxtaposition would be really rich, for an audience to have discoveries alongside more known people doing a performance that’s a little bit unexpected, which we see with Sterling,” Harris says. 

Then she got the attention of one of the biggest names in music. Is God Is ditches realism for a magical, elevated version of what Harris calls the “Dirty South,” taking inspiration from the violent aesthetics of classics like Kill Bill (2003), the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), the cult French thriller La Haine (1995), Eve’s Bayou (1997)… and the visuals from Beyoncé’s album, Lemonade. It felt like a natural next step to include a Beyoncé song in the film’s marketing, but the singer-songwriter is notoriously picky about who gets to use her work. Harris’ director’s cut sold her — “Ya Ya” soundtracks the film’s trailer, which helped it gain a ton of attention.

“She approved it based on that,” Harris says. “She was down for the story. I just feel blessed and honored that that woman saw something she could get behind and didn’t mind lending her tremendous voice to.” 

For a feature length film, Is God Is had a tight, almost guerilla-esque shoot window of 25 days. But Harris believes the end result is an ambitious attempt to thumb its nose at the patriarchy while allowing a story that addresses abuse, violence, and trauma to also be an incredibly fun time. 

“I’m trying to ride this line between real life and magic. Three clicks to the left of center,” Harris says. “How do we elevate? How do we freak a thing that we’ve seen before?”