Look Into My Eyes validates the healing power, if not supernatural ability, of psychic readings

Look Into My Eyes doesn’t set out to prove or disprove the possibility of clairvoyance, although some of the readings filmed might cause a particularly lenient skeptic to second guess. Director Lana Wilson’s documentary about psychics in New York City is a simple film: it interviews and follows a group of psychics, while recording psychic readings with their real-life clients. It disproves the idea that people who seek out psychics primarily want to speak to the dead, learn what their futures hold, or get an inkling as to who they might next fall in love with. Many of them do, but others want questions answered that they can otherwise not easily access. There’s a young Chinese girl, who wants to know why her birth parents gave her up for adoption and what their personalities are like. A teenage boy struggles with his career path and seeks some guidance, as if the psychic is a substitute for his school’s career advisor. One woman wishes to understand the fraught relations with her difficult mother. A young Black man becomes preoccupied with the price tag he finds listed on an enslaved relative and seeks some clarity. And others just want to know what their pets are thinking, coming to the animal psychic who is surprisingly the most intuitive of Wilson’s subjects.

Is it an act? Is it for real? Some of Wilson’s psychics seem to possess an uncanny ability to “know things” that they shouldn’t, and it varies from psychic to psychic just how they attained their supposed skills. One psychic suddenly became more sensitive to paranormal activity out of the blue. Others experienced the death of a loved one, which brought them closer to the afterlife. The animal psychic merely took a “psychic class” and realized she could tap into something she never knew she could.

But the backgrounds of Look Into My Eyes' psychics are, on the whole, incredibly similar: pack rats, literature and cinema-lovers, failed or still struggling creatives—particularly actors, which might cause a cynic to raise an eyebrow. Whether or not it’s all real is beside the point, and Wilson refrains from interrupting readings or prodding her subjects as to the legitimacy of their trade. Wilson—the director of Miss Americana and the Emmy-nominated Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields—is far more compassionate, interested chiefly in the soothing effects of what psychics can offer, effects that can be just as validating as true paranormal prowess.

Perhaps the most uniting aspect of these psychics is their status, or former status, as loners; one woman, particularly religious, came to the city from Oklahoma and felt her first true communal experience at a séance. Two of the psychics are gay men, another struggled with a difficult upbringing by an addict father, another has suicidal thoughts. One woman felt isolated by her narcissist parents’ disinterest in her artistic pursuits, only acknowledged by her father after his near-death experience. (Interestingly, none of the interviewed psychics are straight, white, cis men). All of the psychics are sensitive, artistic, outcasted people, who are more empathetic to the feelings of others than the average person might be. It makes their readings a space not just for potential supernatural experience, but one in which someone who is vulnerable and emotionally in need is being heard by someone who’s willing to receive them. In this way, psychics are almost like therapists, and they offer a type of emotional catharsis that therapists cannot, even if that catharsis is based on fiction. If it succeeds, does it matter if it’s truthful?

Sam Ellison and Stephen Maing’s camera spends most of its time during the readings focused on the clients and their reactions, occasionally cutting back to the psychic or opening up the frame to show both of them together, the person receiving service on one side of the table, the servicer on the other. There’s a quality of unreality to these moments—mostly during the sessions themselves as opposed to the handheld camera used to follow the psychics through their homes or during their days—accompanied by moody, evocative lighting, that allows Look Into My Eyes to feel just as illusory as the questions the psychics purport to have answers to. Sometimes, a psychic gets it wrong, and you can detect a sliver of doubt in the client’s face, wondering if they’re being taken for a ride. But it’s most interesting to see the camera capture the moment of acknowledgment when a psychic gets something right, really right. That moment when the client is no longer a client but a person whose pain is seen and felt, maybe understood in a way that they can’t themselves access. The way their face crumples, their eyes close, a single tear runs down their cheek. When they give themselves over totally to the agony of their emotions in front of someone who is a complete stranger.

It’s comforting to think that someone else has all the answers, even if the psychics find their lives just as uncertain. Look Into My Eyes climaxes with a touching reading between psychic Michael and a woman, Catherine, who turns out to have been his college classmate. She seeks communication with a man that both of them knew, presumably her former boyfriend, who died by suicide. It would stand to reason that Michael knows things about Catherine that would benefit a successful session, but it only really adds another layer of vulnerability to the proceedings—and another layer of comfort for a woman who is already deep in distress. Maybe some clairvoyants are attempting to take advantage of gullible suckers, but the ones in Wilson’s film seem genuinely committed to relieving people of their pain and confusion. As one psychic plainly admits, if they make a mistake in a reading, “if it resonates with them, it doesn’t matter.” Life can be pain, and it only helps us to help each other. It’s a simple thesis, but one that’s easy to forget.

Director: Lana Wilson

Release Date: September 6, 2024