It’s Coming (2024) Documentary Review: An occasionally unnerving tête-à-tête with the supernatural

When it comes to the supernatural, a one-on-one experience is the only way to convince someone that something is real. We’ve all grown up watching movies where evil spirits haunt a family and while most of us would like to believe that they are fantasies, it is pretty real for the one’s experiencing it. Thus, what Shanon Alexander does with his documentary “It’s Coming” is something truly audacious. Much like his previous effort (the 2022 documentary “Sex, Love, Misery: New New York”), he puts himself in on the experience, allowing us to follow along. The result is an occasionally unnerving tête-à-tête with the supernatural.

Choosing New York City as his focal point again; possibly because he is more comfortable filming and finding stories that he is somehow a part of, Alexander’s “It’s Coming” came to existence when he traced one of the legit cases out of the many requests for exorcism that local churches used to get. It led him to Ashley Roland, a mother of 5 living in her ancestral home in Brooklyn. What we see in the documentary is part of what Ashley and her children (3 of who appear in the film in a recurring fashion) face in a house that is haunted by multiple spirits who seem to communicate with them.

After a brief introduction to what Ashley is going through in the house; shadowy, black-colored figures are mentioned now and again, we are also clued into the malevolent nature of these spirits via small acts of displeasure. At one point in the movie, the boom mic that is used in the production suddenly swung towards Ashley and for a hot second I lost my cool. Then there are some really creepy confessions that Ashley’s son Javier makes, claiming to be friends with one of the spirits that really gets to you.

The filmmaker, possibly as an experiment to capture the paranormal can be heard behind the camera communicating with the children and Ashley. I dig the approach because we can get this non-judgmental and curious middle ground for a person who doesn’t believe in the paranormal, as well as a person who does. The director carefully probes through Ashley, asking the right questions at the right time, but the way he is able to get more than what their mother could out of the children, especially from his interactions with Javier gives the film a chilling edge. Additionally, the fact that the film, in some way, is able to take a swing at generational trauma without actually forcing it into the narrative. We only get to know that through Ashley, who has been having experiences with spirits since she was 11 years old, and once she got into her ancestral home, her children also started experiencing it.

There’s more than enough for you to be engaged but at 1 hour 28 minutes, the documentary does feel pretty stretched out and repetitive. It is also not as terrifying for hardcore horror movie fans and only manages to be creepy and unsettling in the middle section of the runtime. The introductory act and the final third feel uneventual, in spite of featuring a full-on exorcism of sorts. That said, there are parts of it that do feel unsettling and I would recommend watching it.