A playwright who has only just picked up a camera. Is God Is (2026) shows Aleshea Harris can write two sisters who feel like people who have only ever had each other; whether she can shoot them as well as she writes them is still an open question.
Fi1m perspective
Racine's hands are never still. Kara Young plays her in Is God Is (2026) with a grin that arrives a second before the violence does, and her twin Anaia, Mallori Johnson, keeps asking whether they have to do this and keeps getting in the car anyway. That is Aleshea Harris's subject in a sentence: two people who want different things and cannot be apart. She wrote them for the stage before she filmed them, and that shows in the good ways and in one less good one.
Harris was a playwright first, and a poet and actor before that. Is God Is began on stage in 2018 and made her name with its story of twin sisters, burned as children, sent to kill the father who set the fire. What to Send Up When It Goes Down (2018) was built as a ritual, with spoken word and the audience taking part, as a response to anti-Black violence. On Sugarland (2022), staged like the earlier play by Whitney White, was a large ensemble piece loosely drawn from Sophocles and set among mobile homes in the South. Greek tragedy, the spaghetti western, hip-hop rhythm and a Mississippi childhood all go into her work, and she has said plainly why: "I love revenge narratives, but I also haven't seen many Black women in them." The film of Is God Is is her first time directing, with Janicza Bravo among the producers who encouraged her to do it; she produced as well.
What she can do is write. The sisters' drive west, sharing food, needling each other, going quiet, moved us more than the plot had any right to, because Harris writes them as people who are not sure that having each other was enough. She has said she is not an advocate for revenge, and that what interests her is the cost to the person who wants it. The film is at its best while it is still counting that cost and the father is still hundreds of miles away.
What she has not yet done is make the pictures keep up. Alexander Dynan shot the film, and the look does not always match the writing; the words are fierce and funny, and the frame around them is often just there. Harris has described the shoot as a trial by fire and has said she leaned on her collaborators for the technical side, which is honest and also visible. The climax lands where the tagline promised. She spends 100 minutes asking whether the old revenge shape is enough and then answers with the old shape, which is a playwright's ending: she would rather finish the argument than surprise us.
None of that is a mark against a first film. The question for the second is whether she will let the camera do some of the work her sentences currently do alone. If she does, the two women in that car suggest she has a great deal left to say. If not, we will still turn up for the talk.
Biography
Aleshea Harris is an American playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. She wrote the play Is God Is, which premiered Off-Broadway at Soho Rep in 2018, and adapted and directed the 2026 film version of the same title, marking her feature directorial debut. She also received screenplay credit on the film.
Harris was born in Germany and raised in the United States as an Army child. She holds a BA from the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA in writing for performance from the California Institute of the Arts. Her other stage works include What to Send Up When It Goes Down and On Sugarland, the latter a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist. Is God Is earned an Obie Award for playwriting and the Relentless Award in 2016.
