If you’d been followed by spirits all your life and didn’t feel like you could talk about it, what would you do?

In It’s Coming, a documentary by Shannon Alexander, Ashley Roland-white shares her story. Now a mother of 5 living in an apartment owned by her husband’s family since the building was built, Roland-white says she first sensed the presence of something supernatural in her life when she was 11 years old. As a Black woman, she says that this kind of issue isn’t as widely talked about by African Americans due to societal perceptions of them. As she sees how the spirits are affecting her children, however, Roland-white feels she can no longer keep this to herself.

A notable stylistic choice in It’s Coming is the lack of narration. Behind the camera, Shannon Alexander asks the occasional question or adds an occasional comment, but mainly lets Roland-white speak for herself. Unfortunately, this lack of narration leads to a lack of necessary context for much of the narrative. How Roland-white and Alexander came to know each other and make this documentary, for example, is a mystery. There’s also very little structure to It’s Coming. We do progress from Roland-white telling her story, to investigating the spiritual presences, to trying to get rid of them, but the timeline is hazy and what leads one decision or another to be made is rarely clear. The film drags in many places because of this.

In addition to Roland-white, we meet three of her children: teenager Alexis, 7-year-old Javier, and little Selena. While Selena is too young to really sense anything amiss, the other two children have stories of paranormal activity in the apartment, especially Javier. His interactions with the spirits are a big part of what leads Roland-white to take the actions she does. While her husband and other two children are not part of It’s Coming, Roland-white clearly cares deeply for her family, not wanting them subjected to the same entities that terrorize her. At night, she sets up cameras to record the hallway where she and Javier have noticed spiritual presences, getting upset when these cameras are messed with. Alexis, Javier, and Selena all claim to have nothing to do with it, but that does leave the three unseen members of the family unaccounted for, so it feels hard to chalk this up to spiritual activity automatically.

A lot of the other on-screen content also feels hard to believe in. Ambiguous shadows move. Roland-white uses a ouija board and pendulum to communicate with spirits a few times, and technological devices for capturing electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are used in multiple places, but the activity always comes across either too subtle to look like anything to viewers, or too clear to not seem like it was faked. Here I must give my typical disclaimer that documentaries are not required to tell the truth just because they are “nonfiction,” and plenty of documentaries, especially of the paranormal variety, have been known to flat-out lie.

Roland-white herself is, for the most part, a believable narrator despite some questionable moments. However, the other people she involves in her investigations set off my “woo-woo detector.” Spiritualist Soledad Haren is the first expert Roland-white works with to investigate the spiritual infestation. Roland-white’s Baptist faith is something she holds tightly to in her battle against evil spirits, and Haren is amenable to this, her own faith seeming to have some Christian flavor to it. And then during an automatic writing session (where a medium holding a pen to paper acts as a conduit for a spirit to write messages), she tells Roland-white that the spirit claims to be called Lilith, and may or may not be the Lilith. “The Lilith” in question belongs solely to Jewish mythology, but is regularly appropriated in culturally Christian spaces, mostly by people who do not have the context for what she actually is. Haren finishes off the session by waving a smoking bundle of sage around Roland-white in a way that, for those in the know, doesn’t even resemble the closed Indigenous practice of smudging.

Even through the combined efforts of Roland-white and Haren, the spiritual activity doesn’t stop, and the former is becoming worried something will happen to Javier. She calls in the DeFlorios, a pair of exorcists (? I think. No one really introduces them, they just sort of show up) to rid the apartment of any evil entities. If you haven’t seen The Conjuring, this might be a good sequence! But if you have, the couple’s bad impressions of the Warrens are impossible to miss. Chris DeFlorio rattles off a near-verbatim quote from the first movie at one point. It’s entirely possible that the DeFlorios are devotees of the real-life Warrens, but no context to confirm, deny, or justify this is given.

It’s Coming is the story of a mother trying to protect her family from supernatural forces. I do believe that this is the heart of it. But it isn’t a story that is told well, and its believability suffers for it. The title graphic is great, and there’s a really great point to be made about the way society treats Black women in crisis. But the film is weighed down by tired tropes, underwhelming filmmaking, and a lack of context that takes away from the emotional core of the story.