Vivica Fox backs Is God Is film with Kara Young, 99-minute adaptation
vivica fox enters the frame through Aleshea Harris’ 99-minute film adaptation of Is God Is, a screen version of her 2018 Off Broadway play that stars Kara Young, Mallori Johnson and Sterling K. Brown. The film centers on twin sisters Anaia and Racine, who pursue their abusive father, credited only as “the Monster.”
99 minutes is tight for a revenge story, and Harris keeps the pressure on it. The film’s cast gives the project its commercial weight: Young, Johnson and Brown carry the action while Harris steers the adaptation from stage to screen.
Harris and the 2018 play
2018 is the source point here, when Harris staged Is God Is Off Broadway before bringing it to film. That move preserves the play’s core setup while changing the medium around it, which is the practical challenge any screen adaptation has to solve: keep the violence, keep the family history, and make the material work without the theater’s confines.
Racine’s brief prologue shows her as a young girl taking a baseball bat to boys taunting her sister off-camera, and that early scene does more than establish temperament. It sets up the sisters’ bond before the film jumps into the present, where Anaia and Racine are 21 and still carrying the damage of the childhood fire.
Kara Young and Mallori Johnson
Kara Young and Mallori Johnson anchor the present-day story as Anaia and Racine. Harris gives them a damaged memory to work through: a tragic fire in the sisters’ childhood home left Anaia facially disfigured and emotionally vulnerable, while Racine was left with permanent burn marks elsewhere on her body.
The story’s friction comes from what the sisters remember and what they do not. They receive information that starts things coming back to them, and that shift is where the movie turns from backstory into pursuit. That setup is lean, and it puts the burden on performance rather than exposition.
Sterling K. Brown and the Monster
Sterling K. Brown plays into the film’s central hunt as the sisters move toward the man credited only as “the Monster.” The credit alone tells you how little the film cares about softening the target or widening the moral frame.
Alexander Dynan shot the film, and Blair McClendon and Jay Rabinowitz edited it, which fits a movie built to move fast and cut hard. Harris’ adaptation is not trying to stretch a stage text into a prestige-length package; it is built as a compact revenge film with a 99-minute runtime and a cast strong enough to carry the material at full tilt.
