Look Into My Eyes Review: Utter Vulnerability 

Look Into My Eyes, the latest film by director Lana Wilson, takes an unflinching look behind the scenes of New York City’s world of psychics.

Look Into My Eyes takes audiences on an intimate journey through the realm of New York City’s psychics to determine the truth behind the practice, address the skepticism towards them, and ultimately show the immeasurable value of human connection. 

Wilson’s documentary follows the lives and practices of seven NYC psychics. The majority of the film consists of sessions between the psychics and their clients who come to them in search of answers and desire the potential to connect with their loved ones who have passed on. Throughout the film, the psychics conducting the sessions become subjects themselves as Wilson dives into the lives of these non-conventual healers.

While, initially, the drive of Look Into My Eyes seems to be a desire to unearth the truth and/or legitimacy of the world of NYC psychics, Wilson comes across something much bigger through her thoughtful analysis of the healers which her film revolves around. By the end of the movie, you’ll forget the central question that sparked its making and instead will be thinking about the value and the importance of intimacy in any and all forms.  

Wilson is very tactful in the way she frames her documentary. It both opens and closes with the same shot, the latter of which is reversed. The opening shot shows the New York cityscape, the shot tracking and scaling in on one apartment’s window. It’s an unassuming window, one that would be easily overlooked and stands to have no real distinction from those around it. However, this is the window in which one of the film’s central psychics operates out of. 

The power of this shot, and its eventual reversal, is to show how large this city and this space are, and how unassuming and small of a scale this form of seeking help can seem. This shot is to say that New York City, full of its many intricacies and complexities, still has a ferocious desire for intimacy. A blind hope that the answers we cannot find within ourselves we could maybe find in someone else, no matter how random it may seem. 

The film crew is given a level of unbridled access to psychic sessions that has never been done before. Through these sessions, we see people at their most utterly vulnerable and at times their most desperate. The peril and pain they are in is palpable through the screen. Even those who come in seemingly skeptical of the process open up to it in front of the audience’s very eyes. 

These sessions start with caution, a cold distance between two strangers who are discussing the most intimate parts of one of their lives with no exchange of equal information from the other. Specifically at the beginning of the film, Wilson employs long shots on the eyes of the clients right as they ask their most personal questions and keeps the shot tight as they anxiously await their answers. This technique goes to show the incredible intention behind each shot that makes the audience feel the tension in the room with these two. 

Whether this film makes you completely believe in psychics or not, it shows there is a true intimacy built in these sessions. Through their conversation, the distance between the psychic and the client begins to dissipate as an understanding builds that has the power to heal.

For many of those who come to the psychics in search of answers, the session feels more therapeutic than supernatural. However, the movie truly hits a unique stride once it turns the focus on the personal lives of the psychics. 

Wilson’s onscreen analysis of the psychics she is following adds a needed refresh to the heavy sessions shown. It doesn’t make the film any lighter, but rather adds a secondary perspective that grounds the sessions in a different reality as throughout the movie we start to understand the psychics within the sessions on a deeper level and how their background might add nuance to how we see these sessions unfolding. 

The most surprising aspect of Look Into My Eyes comes from the personal lives of the psychics themselves. While there is more attraction to the scenes that sit in on the psychic sessions due to their raw intimacy, the scenes in which we get to know the psychics on a deeper level will move you in a way you will not expect.

With the gifts of psychics so widely misunderstood, the emotional toll these healing sessions take on the psychics themselves seems to be the last thing you think about. However, at the end of the day, these normal people who have been born with a true gift take on an enormous emotional burden they have to carry alone.

These psychics provide comfort to so many, they must take on the emotional weight of so many in order to provide answers. They talk at length about how they feel the weight of these interactions come and go through them as the spirits do. It puts into perspective the selflessness of the practice and the generosity of these people to do this in the hope of providing comfort to absolute strangers. 

Wilson takes this concept one step further and has several psychics open up about loved ones they have lost and their inability to reach them even though they do possess the gift to speak to those no longer with us. This inability to self-soothe when needed most creates an extraordinary contradiction in the lives of these psychics, they are these modern healers who can heal strangers but not the people closest to home, not even themselves. 

At times, Look Into My Eyes collapses under its own enormous emotional weight. There are sparse glimpses of levity, but the light that comes within the film is reserved seemingly for its very beginning and very end, making it difficult for audiences to survive under the massive weight of the middle of the story. 

Similarly, it’s a daring move to strip a film down this much and rely on the sole emotional vulnerability of two people. It causes the film to drag during specific sessions because we experience the roadblocks of each session with the client and healer. While understandable in the structure of the documentary, it doesn’t entice the audience in the way Wilson believes it should and we are left feeling like we are stuck in one session longer than we should be. However, this seems to be the danger of committing entirely to this specific format the sessions are shown in. 

Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes is bold and dares audience members to keep looking. It’s the type of experimental filmmaking that makes you look at the world differently. What starts out as a niche documentary about a small, seemingly unrelatable, group of New Yorkers snowballs into an emotional look at the process of healing, the importance of connection and the beauty of intimacy. While all of Wilson’s decisions don’t entirely pay off, she exhibits the type of fearlessness in filmmaking that makes her work so exciting to watch. You may not walk away with as many answers about psychics and their world as you want, but you will walk out understanding the value of human connection no matter what form it comes in.

Look Into My Eyes will be released in US theaters on September 6, 2023. Read our review of Skincare!