Aleshea Harris has a clear message for anyone who watches Is God Is and reaches for a Quentin Tarantino reference. She appreciates the compliment — then immediately rejects it.
“I don’t want to be like a poor man’s Tarantino, you know?” Harris told the Associated Press. “I am doing my own thing, and I hope that people recognize that. It seems like they are.”
The comment arrives as Harris steps into Hollywood as a first-time feature director, adapting her own 2018 off-Broadway play — which won her three Obie Awards — into a Southern Gothic revenge thriller now playing in theaters. Rather than one primary touchstone, she drew from a broad spread of sources: Greek tragedies, Westerns, fairytales, and films including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Moonlight, Lady Snowblood, and Amélie. Her stated aim was to build a world that felt like “three clicks to the left of center” — realism, but ratcheted up.
Harris, now 44, was born in Germany, raised in the American South, and wrote the original play while on food stamps, subletting a North Hollywood apartment and working multiple jobs including teaching at CalArts, where she earned her MFA, and working part-time at David’s Bridal. The story sprang from a desire to write Greek tragedy populated by characters who looked and sounded like herself.
The film follows twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), both scarred by a childhood fire, who travel to their disfigured mother’s deathbed — she is known only as God, played by Vivica A. Fox — and are sent to kill the father, the Monster (Sterling K. Brown), who started the blaze. Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander, and Mykelti Williamson round out a cast that Sterling K. Brown described as drawing him in specifically because, as he put it, “I love seeing Black women win.”
Tessa Thompson and filmmaker Janicza Bravo were among the producers who kept the project alive after early Hollywood interest collapsed during the Covid pandemic. Harris has called them “the gears in the machine to make it go.”
Critics have responded warmly, flagging Harris’s control of tone as the film’s most striking achievement — her ability to fold spaghetti westerns, grindhouse extremism, and Greek tragedy into something that feels entirely singular. Harris herself has described the project as a turning point, saying, “This was the first time I was like, No, I’m just going to do what I want to do, what I think is delicious.”
