Written and Directed by Aleshea Harris, based on her play | 99 min | ▲▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime

Twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) live together, work together, and are literally telepathic. They’re both burn survivors living with a tapestry of scars. One day they get a letter from their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), who they thought was dead. They drive down south to where she’s at, finding her also deeply scarred in more ways than one. They call her God, because she’s the creator. She tells the harrowing tale of how they all got the burns, and asks her daughters one simple favour: “Make your daddy dead.”

So kicks off this stylish revenge picture, which in some ways feels more like a fable or a modern western. The key relationship here is between the tough, smaller Racine and the taller, emotional Anaia, who don’t always agree on everything like, say, how to murder their father. The morality of what they’re doing troubles ‘Naia more than ‘Cine, too.

They follow a series of clues to where Daddy may be living, starting with a religious woman, Divine (Erika Alexander), who took up with him after he was put on trial and got off. He left once Divine was pregnant, but she bears him no ill will.

We also meet a lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) whose tongue Daddy took. The picture does a good job proving this dude deserves whatever is coming to him.  A woman they encounter later, played by Janelle Monáe, doesn’t necessarily, but the road to revenge is bloody.

When, finally, we’re shown Daddy’s face, not just his brilliant smile, it’s the charismatic Sterling K. Brown, and the movie reaches down and finds a depth, a grief, it was only hinting at to start. Those opening acts stand in the shallows of genre, but the final emotional reality supersedes those thrills to say something about sisterhood and longstanding family trauma. Potent and unique, it’s worth sticking with right to the end.