The new trailer for “Is God Is” doesn’t really tease so much as throw a lit match and walk away —pardon the unfortunate metaphor, given the material. The campaign’s three-word mission statement—“Redemption. Revenge. Rage”—also reads like a warning label, and it fits a story that starts in trauma and immediately swerves into something fiercer, stranger, and more mythic than a standard payback thriller.
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Aleshea Harris—an Obie-winning playwright adapting her own stage play—writes and directs the film, which opens exclusively in theaters on May 15. Kara Young (“I’m a Virgo”) and Mallori Johnson (“Kindred”) star as twin sisters Racine and Anaia, bound by shared history and a new directive that lands like an order.
The official synopsis frames the engine plainly: “Twin sisters bound by an unbreakable connection as they fulfill their dying mother’s final command: hunt down the monstrous father who destroyed their family.” It’s a premise built for escalation, with no patience for half-measures—justice as blood debt, pushed forward by a parent who isn’t asking, she’s ordering.
And that mother is the film’s dark center. In Harris’ story, she’s known only as She—called “God” by her daughters—still alive, still scarred, still in control, even from a bed. Accounts of the trailer’s setup say she tells them their father is the one responsible for the fire that disfigured all three of them, and her final demand is blunt: find him.
The cast only heightens the volatility. Young and Johnson lead, with Janelle Monáe, Vivica A. Fox, and Sterling K. Brown featured alongside Erika Alexander, Mykelti Williamson, and Josiah Cross.
What sells the trailer’s “bonkers” charge—without turning this into a shot-by-shot—is how it frames revenge as a fevered ritual instead of a neat plot mechanism. The mother’s command isn’t just backstory; it’s an inheritance, carried like a curse and treated like a mission. And because Harris is translating her own play, there’s a built-in sense this won’t be a polite “prestige thriller”—it’s closer to a revenge myth dragged across American dirt roads, where family history is the map and rage is the compass.
Either way, the release plan is straightforward: May 15, in theaters. Watch the trailer below.
