Look Into My Eyes
Written and Directed by Lana Wilson
Runtime: 1 hour and 48 minutes
In Theaters September 6

by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

A24 Films has been stewarding some of the most exciting, dynamic, and unconventional works in cinema since the company’s inception. When I saw their name attached to Lana Wilson’s new documentarian project, Look Into My Eyes, I had high expectations. Those expectations were not simply met, but exceeded by the eviscerating intimacy and overwhelming candor of this documentary film following a selection of New York City psychics and their myriad clientele.

It would be reductive to say that Wilson’s documentary is about the seven psychic-mediums that it chronicles throughout, though it is not inaccurate to say that those individuals, their practices, and their stories are the subject. The documentary, rather, feels like a frequently affirming, but occasionally harrowing underworld journey through loneliness, desperation, love, and loss.

Throughout the course of the film we return, time and time again, to the taut balance of fragility and resolve of the human heart: its tremendous capacity to hope and long, and its fearful measures at self-protection. It is these core, integral experiences of mankind’s condition which make Look Into My Eyes so profound and impactful. One does not have to believe in mediumship in order to understand that there is an ache which exists in the heart of a human which cannot be resolved through sheer willpower and practical problem-solving alone. It is an existential affliction, and it is a collective condition. Wilson’s documentary bleeds with this deeply human truth, providing unrelenting catharsis for the viewer.

Look Into My Eyes features clean, tight shots which often provide unflinching and honest portraits of the minutiae of facial expressions, of the way the face responds involuntarily to the invisible force of emotion. There are moments where the raw vulnerability being captured makes you feel voyeuristic, as if it would be more polite to avert your eyes and turn away from what is on screen. This appears to be an intentional choice, a deliberate excitation. Wilson is demanding you to be present with not just the emotional nakedness of the individual in the film, but your own nakedness, as well. It is challenging and painful in the way that breakthrough therapy sessions are challenging and painful. It is exultant and freeing if we allow it to be.

Wilson’s approach remains impartial and unbiased to any position or opinion on the reality of psychic, spiritist, or mediumistic phenomena. This work is not here to answer any definitive metaphysical questions, or to name anyone as genuine or charlatan. Instead, Look Into My Eyes is an irresistible siren song calling you into a cliffside of nearly intolerable empathy and emotional catharsis. While using the restroom after the press screening, I overheard two women in conversation about the film. Through the strange linoleum echo, a trembling voice spoke:“This made me sit with how really close to tears we are at all times; you just have to mention loss and the tears come. We just walk around this world with tears so close to coming.”

Yes, we are perpetually riding an invisible hedge between keeping it together and erupting into tears. Maybe not for the same reason, or the same type of tears, but when stripped of defensive machinations and confronted by the ecstasy and the agony of the human experience, of unprecedented loneliness and unbearable love, the tears are always close. They are the fluid conductor through which we all call out to each other’s spirits, both living and dead, in hope that we may be seen and understood in our fullness. Look Into My Eyes does just this: it witnesses, without benediction or malediction, the fullness of the human experience and reveals its unspeakable and tender beauty.