Tag Archives: mythic

IS GOD IS – Review

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– By Cate Marquis –

Revenge is the theme of director/writer Aleshea Harris’ IS GOD IS but there is a lot more going on here than payback and violence, although there is certainly that, in this film that has been called a vengeance action/thriller that has been described as a combination of Afropunk and Spaghetti Western, along with a dose of dark humor and a bit of epic quest, with some deeper questions to ponder.

Aleshea Harris makes her directorial debut with this film, which she adapted from her award-winning play, which deals with the trauma and abuse endured by Black women. It is told as a mythic quest by twin sisters, a tale rooted firmly both in the present and in ancient Greek theater and myths. The written version of the play resembles poetry, with different fonts and text that is sometimes upside down, and there is visual poetry here too, along with the violence.

Black twin sisters Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young) were burned and scarred in childhood, when their father set fire to their mother. Raised in foster homes, where they learned to depend only on each other, the now 21-year-old twins are close but very different. They dress similar and have the same long blonde braided hair, but they are not identical and they differ in personality and temperament too. Racine is the bold one, the twin who takes action, fiercely defending her sister as well as herself against any slight or attack. Anaia is the quiet one, who keeps her head down and tries to blend into the background, but she is also the one who thinks and considers before deciding on an action, instead of just jumping in as Racine does.

The twins share a tiny, shabby apartment in the “Northeast,” where they have created their own insular life while getting by working low-wage service industry jobs. They are shocked when they get a letter from the mother they thought was dead, Ruby (), who is asking them to come to her because she has a request before she dies. Leaving their jobs and the Northeast, they drive their beat-up 1985 car to what they call the “Dirty South,” to meet the woman who claims to be their mother.

They find Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) in bed, covered in scars and attended by female helpers, as if she is a queen, even though she is living in a shack. Her request is simple but horrifying: she wants her long-lost daughters to find and kill their father, the man who burned they all.

Racine agrees readily but Anaia balks at this request, coming from a woman they hardly know and asking them to do something at great risk to themselves. What are the consequence for the two of them to commit this act of violence? Why did their mother wait until now to contact them? Eventually, Anaia agrees when Racine assures her she will do all the violence, and Anaia will take no part, but must come along because Racine can’t do it without her.

The first thing is to find their long-vanished daddy.

Thus the sisters set out on a quest that takes them through a South that is both very real yet mythic. It is both classic myth, ancient Greek theater, and classic Spaghetti Western, mixed with drive-in movie fare. They embark on their quest for vengeance, both grounded in the real and stylized, a quest filled with movie reference, theatrical ones, and some surprising, even darkly comic ones. The people they encounter change the twins, particularly Anaia. The story is firmly grounded in the contemporary, as well as myth – of the South, of tales of vengeance, of quests, of the experiences of Black women and the long history of what Black women have endured.

Harris shows a natural gift as a film director, handling horror and action scenes masterfully, and the quieter scenes of conversations between the girls, where they contemplate what they are doing, with the right, gentle touch.

The story begins a horrifying one, a flashback of the girls’ shared trauma, in black and white and narrated by their mother. In this chilling sequence, we see their mother’s unease before their abusive father, barred by court order, breaks in, sets their mother on fire and the girls catch fire as well, while their father casually strolls away. Scenes of childhood bullying and others of the girls innocently playing before the horrific event also recur throughout the film.

The meaning of the title is unclear, although it put me in mind of that old blues song “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby.” It is both a question and a statement, made in Black vernacular. The twins call their mother “God,” because, as Racine puts it, “she made us,” and at one point, Anaia tells someone “We’re on a mission from God.” The Blues Brothers reference is both a touch of dark humor and one of several movie references this stylized revenge epic. The twins themselves have a mythic quality, being opposites of a sort but completely tied, even complementary, to each other. They aren’t the only twins in the story, but the others who are less loving versions of this dichotomy.

The acting is superb, with both charismatic fireball Kara Young and quiet Mallori Johnson turning in strong performances. The supporting cast is excellent, including Vivica A. Fox and Janelle Monae, as with a startling performance by Sterling K. Brown, as you have never seen him before.

Besides the top-notch acting and strong direction, the film features fine photography, with wide-open vista, iconic images, and locations and sets that are spot on perfect. Nothing stage-y about this big screen adaptation.

This is a film with something to say and gives thinking audiences plenty to ponder, but director/writer Harris wraps it in an action/horror/adventure package so that audiences who just want that ride can just do that. Be warned that the violence is plentiful and gripping, but the psychological depth is there too, with plenty going on beneath the surface between the twins. There is much to intrigue the thinking viewer.

IS GOD IS opens in theaters on Friday, May 15, 2026.

RATING: 3.5 out of 4 stars

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS – Review

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(l-r, foreground) Johnny Depp as Colonel Joll and Mark Rylance as the Magistrate, in WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the old saying goes, and if you assume everyone is your enemy, they might become exactly that. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is drama based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel, that presents a cautionary tale about nations or empires sowing the seeds of their own destruction in their search for imagined threats. Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson star in director Ciro Guerra’s powerful adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s classic novel of the same name, in a haunting cautionary tale of empire and cultural misunderstanding, with a striking contemporary echoes.

There is a lot of talent assembled in this film – an Oscar-nominated director, a Nobel Prize-winning author, an Oscar winning cinematographer, and Oscar winners and nominees among the fine cast. Such as assemblage doesn’t guarantee success but it has worked here. Although this myth-like story takes place in an unspecified time and place, the points it makes are universal, concerning the dangers of the false assumptions of torture and militaristic mindsets. Torture tends to extract the information you want – even if it is not true. History has shown this time and again, from the Inquisition to Abu Ghraib.

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS fits in well with the anti-colonial message of the director’s previous work. This is the first English-language film by Colombian director Ciro Guerra, whose previous films include the Oscar-nominated EMRACE OF THE SERPENT. Guerra has long been an admirer of the novel WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by Nobel Prize-winning South African author J. M. Coetzee. The director made at least two previous efforts to bring the award-winning novel to the big screen before succeeding – oh-so-well – with this one.

Mark Rylance plays the Magistrate, a mild-mannered colonial administrator who has long been in charge of a remote garrison outpost on a quiet, sparsely populated border of an unnamed colonial empire. The Magistrate efficiently and fairly handles the few problems that arise in this sleepy corner of the unnamed empire, which leaves him plenty of time for his hobby of amateur archaeology exploring the ancient history of the region.

When an official from the empire’s center, Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), arrives in his fine carriage with a small contingent of soldiers, the Magistrate is not concerned. He greets the officious Joll politely and prepares to make his report on conditions around the garrison. As the Magistrate tells one of his assistants, he has seen this before. Every ten years, he says, the empire feels the need to send someone to check on the “barbarians” on the border, just to make sure all is right, and then they leave.

The Magistrate expects the same from this colonel but Joll is different. With a decidedly unpleasant, even arrogant manner, Joll constantly wears his newly-invented sunglasses which conceal his eyes and seems little interested in the Magistrate’s efforts to tell him about the current conditions on the border. Instead, Joll’s focus falls on a pair of nomads, “barbarians” he arrested on the way to the garrison, and Joll’s methods involve torture. The Magistrate is shocked but, suppressing his feelings, he calmly quizzes Joll about the usefulness of the torture. Joll reveals his belief that “the enemy,” meaning the nomads just beyond the border, are planning an attack on the empire, and then extols his own skill at extracting information, never once acknowledging that his victims might have no secret information to tell.

When Joll leaves the garrison to check on other parts of the border, the Magistrate’s disgust spill overs, and he cleans the garrison of all traces of the colonel’s visit, restoring it to its usual peaceful, orderly life. But then another the officer of the empire shows up, an assistant to Joll named Mandel (Robert Pattinson). Mandel as even more brutal and committed to ferreting out a secret invasion by the barbarians.

Two-time Oscar winning cinematographer Chris Menges (THE KILLING FIELDS, THE MISSION, THE READER) fills the screen with sweeping desert vistas, dusty interiors of the garrison, and views of the Magistrate’s neat, book-filled office. The photography is stunning, imbuing the film with a sense of its remoteness and isolation, and setting the characters in that same overwhelmingly stark place.

The story is very much in the vein of the mythic, and the actors play characters that are symbolic of forces within human nature as much as people. Rylance, Depp and Pattinson are all superb, although the greatest load in telling this tale falls to the gifted Rylance, who plays both the human heart and a voice of decency overwhelmed by drive to war and suspicions of the “other.”

Beyond the lead actors, fine performances are offered by Greta Scacchi as the Magistrate’s housekeeper Mai, a sympathetic ear who also represents the civilians buffeted by the dangerous decisions of Joll and Mandel, and Harry Melling as a young soldier serving under the Magistrate, torn by what he sees. Both actors make the most of these small but important roles. Gana Bayarsaikhan, a striking Mongolian model-turned-actress who had minor roles in WONDER WOMAN and EX MACHINA, appears as a pivot character identified only as the “barbarian girl,” in a nice performance in her first major screen role.

Although the story seems to take place in a distant time and place, what it is saying about human nature is chillingly contemporary and timeless. The story takes place at a purposely vague place and time, at an outpost at the a distant border of an unspecified empire, a deliberate choice of the novel. The dusty, windswept desert location and the Asian features of the nomad suggests Central Asia, the uniforms suggest the French Foreign Legion, and other details suggest the 19th Century, but nothing is definite. In fact, the film was shot in Morocco and Italy,and the cast playing the garrison’s officials and solders sport British accents. All that matters is that it is some colonial power and an outpost on a remote border, in a quiet, sparsely populated area very far from the center of the empire.

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is divided into four chapters labeled by season but not quite in order. Colonel Joll arrives in the heat of summer, where his brutality scorches the landscape. Mandel does not arrive until the cold, dark winter, bringing dismay that the chapter opened in summer continues. There is another chapter set in spring, centered on a teen know only as “the barbarian girl” (Gana Bayarsaikhan), who turns up at the garrison, an apparent victim of torture. The final chapter, tellingly, is set in fall.

This is an impressive piece of mythic film making, powerful parable about colonialism, brutality toward the “other,’ and how we can inadvertently create the danger we fear. The drama sends a powerful message about torture in particular, and the danger in the ignorance of other cultures and misunderstandings arising out of mistaken assumptions. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is available on demand and on digital starting on Friday, Aug. 7.

RATING: 3 1/2 out of 4 stars