In the new thriller Is God Is, violence lurks everywhere. It’s embodied in part a youngish woman named Racine, who needs only the merest prompting to seek out revenge. Early on, we see Racine and her twin sister Anaia as children, sitting on a bench, backs to the camera, as a passing kid insults Anaia for being ugly; Anaia has burns all over her face, while Racine’s matching skin is less noticeable, on her arm and hand. As the cruel child leaves the frame, Racine rises and follows, and offscreen we hear the sounds — the cries — of violent retribution. Racine then returns to comfort her sister.

Later, the twins are summoned to visit their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox, not initially recognizable), long presumed dead by the same consuming fire lit by their monstrous father (Sterling K. Brown) on his way out the door. They haven’t seen Ruby in decades and might reasonably decline her rationale for keeping her life a secret from them. But when she gives them their marching orders — “make your daddy dead,” she tells them, as revenge for what he did to them — Racine is more than ready to obey.

She’s a who is that character, played by a who is that performer: Kara Young. This is distinct from a that guy performer, where viewers might know the face but not the name. Diligent viewers may recognize Young from two episodes of HBO’s The Staircase, or two episodes of The Punisher, where she played a Homeland Security worker. She had a major role in the Boots Riley miniseries I’m a Virgo, and appears in his second film I Love Boosters, coming next week, meaning she’ll have two movies in theaters at the same time – especially notable for someone who has appeared in all of half a dozen features so far. She hasn’t quite accumulated the credits needed for a that guy.

On stage, however, Kara Young is on a tear. She is currently on Broadway in a revival of the play Proof, a supporting player to stars Don Cheadle and Ayo Edebiri. She did not receive a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her work. This is notable because it breaks an astonishing four-year streak of her being nominated in that category, culminating in back-to-back wins: Last year, for the Pulitzer-winning play Purpose; and the year before, for a scene-stealing turn in the revival of Purlie Victorious. The latter is actually streamable for free as part of the PBS Great Performances series. These broadcasts rarely capture the full energy of a live performance, but it’s still worth watching to catch a glimpse of the electricity Young brings to her role of Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins, a daft-not-dumb young woman enlisted to by a preacher to help con a plantation owner out of a family inheritance owed to his departed cousin. Teetering in uncomfortable heels and on the verge of nerve-rattled disaster, Lutiebell throws herself into the task – her love for Purlie provides the deciding motivation – just as Young throws herself into Lutiebell’s shaky but determined headspace. She uses a wavering, gravelly voice to keep her performance grounded even in moments of high farce. It’s a command performance — “featured” almost doesn’t do it justice — keeping pace with Hamilton’s Leslie Odom Jr. in the lead.

Is God Is also has roots in the stage, as well as the Black experience, though unlike Purlie there aren’t any white characters here. Writer-director Aleshea Harris adapts her own play for her feature film debut, and in the process seems to have hybridized between the two media. Some aspects of the text feel intentionally stagy, like the ceremoniousness with which Racine and Anaia (Mallori Johnson, also excellent, and who has even fewer film and TV credits than Young) are brought back into their mother’s orbit, or how much of the back half of the movie is set in a single location, or the in-moment narration provided by some of the characters where you can picture the rest of the stage momentarily going dark as the spotlighted actor turns to the audience. (I have no idea if this was how it was actually staged, but that’s how it feels.

But Harris also takes full advantage of things she likely couldn’t do on stage, especially in depicting the closeness of the twin sisters: Sometimes she uses on-screen subtitles to convey a telepathic communication between them, and sometimes she uses split-screen in conversations where they’re both present, to accentuate or mitigate the physical distance between them. Even that second half of the film, where the sisters wind up at a property where their father has started a new life, circles back around to cinema, recalling Quentin Tarantino’s Western and revenge phases, specifically Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Django Unchained. Harris seems less interested in the kicky, grindhouse-y side of movie vengeance, though plenty of blood does flow; instead, she slowly zooms into the gothic horror lurking beneath respectable veneers. Maybe it’s no accident that Racine’s less world-facing scars have enabled her to be both bolder and more capricious in her wielding of violence; Anaia doesn’t seem afforded the same luxury, though she does benefit from her sister’s protectiveness. There’s tension, too, between the literary conceits (the sisters’ mother is referred to as God, for she is their creator) and the revenge-movie immediacy of Racine sticking a stone instead a sock and using it as a deadly weapon.

Some of the movie’s details are ground up by that tension. There’s one sequence that left me baffled as to whether some or all of it was supposed to be a dream, because it ends with a hard cut to characters being startled awake in a new location, with no explanation. There’s a character who I could have sworn Anaia stops Racine from killing, then later blithely refers to as being dead. Janelle Monáe is effective as a woman who knows from abuse yet still wants to maintain the social strata that place her above the sisters, yet I’m not sure if it’s the best or most interesting use of her particular magnetism.

In short, connective roads between stops on the movie’s journey are not always readily visible. Eventually, those cracks widen; there’s maybe an emotional gap between the movie’s gothic-grindhouse grandeur and the “real” lives of Racine and Anaia, glimpsed in an early scene of them on the job as after-hours cleaning staff without feeling completely filled in. (The nagging question beneath the more grounded scenes: How would Racine really manage to keep a lid on her understandable anger and vengefulness for this many years? Or perhaps more importantly, what has that been like for her? Some of that struggle remains opaque, or at least lacking off-screen life.)

Young does her best to bridge those gaps, though. She’s both theatrical in her command of the movie’s physical space and able to handle close-ups without playing to the rafters. Racine is an entirely different person from her recent stage characters: different voice, different physicality, but same electric presence. I wouldn’t want her to abandon Broadway for the movies – it’s a little like the contrast between seeing a great live act and watching their well-directed music video – but her self-possession, her readiness, and her presence are all undeniable. Broadway-watchers will already be aware; for everyone else, Is God Is takes her from who is that to there she is and good for her.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Purlie Victorious on PBS