99 min | R | May 15, 2026 | Amazon
Aleshea Harris adapts her own play into a strange, uncomfortable revenge story that lands on the strength of its performances. The tone is deliberately off and that is the entire point.
Aleshea Harris makes her directorial debut adapting her stage play about twin sisters who go on a revenge quest against the father who burned them as children. The film commits hard to its own peculiar register from the first scene. It is part myth, part Western, part family drama, and it refuses to settle into any of them. That refusal is the appeal.
Kara Young and Mallori Johnson are the foundation. They play sisters who carry their scars literally and emotionally, and they sell every beat of the bond between them. Young brings a coiled intensity. Johnson plays the softer half without making her weak. Together they hold the film together when the surrounding choices threaten to tip into theatrical excess. Sterling K. Brown shows up as the absent father and does the kind of work he does best, full of menace and damage in equal measure. Janelle Monáe and Vivica A. Fox round out a cast that all seem to be acting in slightly different movies, which somehow works.
The style is unusual and challenging. Harris stages scenes like they belong on a stage half the time. Dialogue is stylized. The violence is mythic rather than realistic. Some of it is uncomfortable to sit through, which is clearly the point. This is not a film that wants you comfortable. The cinematography leans into harsh light and deep shadow, and the production design pushes the genre-blender approach without going full pastiche.
The result is a debut that announces a real voice. Harris is not interested in conventional pacing or audience hand-holding. The film asks you to meet it where it lives, and the performances make that worth doing. It will not work for everyone. The sisters at the center are reason enough to see it.