What ‘Is God Is’ Reveals About Generational Trauma, According To Vivica A. Fox, Erika Alexander, Janelle Monáe And Cast

Kara Young stars as Racine and Mallori Johnson as Anaia in IS GOD IS, from Amazon MGM Studios.

Patti Perret © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Lauded playwright Aleshea Harris is making her directorial debut with Is God Is, a Southern Gothic, Afropunk-style thriller and silver-screen adaptation of her award-winning play, set to launch on May 15th. In Is God Is, two sisters embark on an epic quest for revenge, confronting a charged family history and generational trauma that will push them to extraordinary lengths. Produced by Tessa Thompson, the film also features a star-studded cast, including Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander, Mykelti Williamson, Josiah Cross, and Vivica A. Fox and Sterling K. Brown.

The thriller is set in the Deep South and rife with biblical allegory, aptly displayed within the title, ‘God’ is in this film is a woman, named Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), who is severely burned due to a fire created at the hands of her ex-husband (Sterling K. Brown). Her children, twins, Anaia and Racine (Mallori Johnson and Kara Young), were also left with permanent burn marks in different places on their bodies.

After the incident, the twins were put into foster care, and never heard from their mother again or knew why they had the burns on their bodies – until one day, they received a letter with a request for them to visit her in the South. While seeing their mother on her deathbed, the twins listened to Ruby share what happened that caused the fire, all about their father’s new families and wives, and demanded them to seek revenge for them all, by making their “daddy dead — real dead,” which serves as the film’s tagline, and plot, as the twin accepts their mother’s challenge and decides to hunt their dad for revenge.

From there the sisters journey from the Deep South to California to confront their father for their familial past and trauma, as they encounter interesting characters along the way, including Divine The Healer played brilliantly by Erika Alexander who is cultish evangelical preacher and mother of their father’s son, Ezekiel, played by actor Josiah Cross, or Janelle Monáe who is their father’s current trophy wife – desperate for a new start away from her abusive husband and surly teenage sons. “Ruby was a catalyst for just setting it off. I was grateful, to be very honest with you, for that experience, for the fact that she’s at the end of her days, and for the fact that she does get to see her daughters. She gets some revenge and satisfaction because the daughters thought she was dead, and then she gets to set off the whole revenge is mine journey,” Fox said to me during our Zoom interview emphatically.

Aside from revenge being a core theme, the film lifts the veil around domestic violence and attempted femicide, which is currently plaguing the Black women’s community. While Fox’s character experienced physical abuse often from her ex-husband (Brown), Monae’s character lived with constant psychological abuse. “I actually struggled while playing my character. My character made choices that had me questioning, ‘How could you be married to this monstrous man? How dare you? So, I had to ask myself, ‘How do I prepare for something that, personally, if given the information about this person, I wouldn’t accept in real life?’ But the role made me think even further, how people, women, Black women, who are in love, can be blinded at times,” she stated. “Women can be sold a dream; they can be lied to. I think you’re meeting my character as she wakes up and stands up for herself. She’s taking back her body, her mind, and spirit, and I love the bravery in her saying no more. I think that’s so many women’s experience becoming survivors, and I wanted to pay homage to the survivors of the world.”

While trauma can spark overcoming and survival, and sometimes revenge, it can also leave people who’ve experienced it stuck. That’s the case for Alexander’s character Divine, who, in her delusion, hasn’t moved on from Brown and is banking on him to return to her after decades of abandonment. “I think most people are doing the best they can, and you have times where you don’t have the capacity, and I think that Divine doesn’t have the capacity to move on. So she’s stuck. She’s in a certain purgatory. The Hindus believe that we’re all here playing parts, and that you are on stage to play a specific part for the greater humanity,” she shared.

The film raises questions around what happens when generational trauma is adequately addressed, and the price of that honesty, as well as what it means to seek healing and resolution. For Young and Johnson, the film’s protagonists, their characters’ trauma was visceral and constant. “When we meet these two women at the beginning of this film, they know that they have been burned, and what they don’t know is the how and the why and the who, and getting that letter from their mother to visit her on her deathbed, and then understanding the origin story of their burns. It’s as if, for me, in my thoughts, that these burns represent the traumas,” Young said to me during a Zoom interview. “This film encourages us to reflect on how we are wearing our traumas of the unknown? It asks us to look at our family lineage and reflect on how we were able to live our lives, pursue our dreams, and do the things our families have not been able to do. I believe we’re still wearing our family’s traumas. There’s this interesting sort of lineage of things that we do not know.”

Johnson agreed, “The scars our mother had in the film were passed down to us, that was such a beautiful thing, Alesha, did to showcase how generational trauma is passed on. Black people had these huge traumatic scars inside of them, in their spirit, and that can be passed down to their children, and it gets a little bit smaller and more unique each time and on each person that imprint is in our family lineage. I definitely recognized that as I was acting throughout the film, every time they put the skin on me, it served as a deeper meaning than just surface-level scars. We were the people who were scarred externally and internally,” she said.

She continued, “I was keenly aware of what it meant to carry this lineage from our mother, and that at the end of the story, Anaia steps away from the generational trauma. She steps out of the frame of that. I hope that’s what the audience understands from this film, that you can step away from the story that you tell yourself about who you are and where you come from at any point in time, and that is a releasing of pain, that in itself, is how you retell your own story.”

Is God Is premieres in theaters on May 15, 2026.