MOVE staffer Aurora Nicol rewatches True/False documentary pick “Look Into My Eyes” which is now available to stream.
Last March, on a crisp Sunday night, I walked up Hitt Street to see my first True/False documentary. It was Lana Wilson’s seven-years-in-the-making “Look Into My Eyes.” Wilson introduced herself before kicking off the film. At the end, she held a brief Q&A where my raised hand never got called. Having previously been a vivacious Cannes panel viewer, I enjoyed the experience, feeling the closest I’ve ever been to brushing against the film world.
“Look Into My Eyes” is a documentary profiling seven psychics in New York City, curiously asking questions about how real their trade/occupation is. We’re shown clips of the psychics both being “right” and “wrong” with their clients. The movie isn’t very argumentative against their existence nor does it push a pro-agenda. It’s a documentary for audiences to consider the reality of the profession.
Post A24 logo, we hear the loud city sounds and are introduced to New York City via a beautiful cityscape, zooming in through a window. Often in artwork, windows make for the audiences to feel voyeuristic (think, Edward Hopper). This is seen as the audience is brought into a private psychic session.
We’re first introduced to a seemingly sensible, stable person: a doctor, generally seen as the people who help us, the backbone of what care means. Yet, here we are listening to a doctor bring up institutional and systemic issues in her vocation, how she’s been failed by a lack of mental training for helping to deal with the trauma she sees in the field.
She unpacks a story from 20 years ago with not the usual, societally accepted therapist, but a psychic. Revealed in her last sentence, she asks about a long-dead patient with nothing but empathy in her heart: “Is she okay?”
What does it mean when those who help us and are seen as pillars of genius, as gods in scrubs, want help from something society perceives as false? That’s exactly what Wilson explores in the film. During the Q&A in March, Wilson called herself a skeptic, but she admits the relationship created by these patients and psychics is real. Whatever is affecting them is still alive, the contact they desire with the dead is what keeps them living.
“Look Into My Eyes” doesn’t only focus on those wanting to speak to dead relatives. Wilson goes from the doctor’s session to varying reasons patients might see a psychic. One of the most interesting subjects, to me, was Phoebe, a pet psychic. Her dry humor, heavy eyeliner and love for John Waters made her entertaining to watch.
Although the sheer amount of subjects can be overwhelming, “Look Into My Eyes” isn’t a particularly long movie, only 105 minutes, where it attempts to cover a lot of ground. There are slow moments that build in these patient/psychic moments that call for more footage, more time and more questions. Truthfully, there were just too many subjects. The film repeatedly cuts to another one of the psychic’s apartments, leaving questions unanswered.
Albeit interesting to understand the psychics themselves, is it not their work that we want to see? Some facts from their backgrounds become increasingly connected and apparent to the film’s very thesis. The sheer number of subjects, all seven, combined with the repetitive cut aways from session to their personal lives makes you realize how interconnected their interests are.
It turns out that almost all seven of those representing the hundreds of New York psychics are also actors. A few have film or theater degrees and one had a one-woman show decades ago. Psychic Nikenya answers Wilson’s question: “How is what you’re doing not theater improv?” immediately with, “I don’t,”- implying the two are more similar than we think.
Nikenya asks, “How do we know our imagination is not energetic information?” She recounts that her improv background helps her process information, and present what comes up when she makes contact.
The film explores the actors’ backgrounds and continues to prod them. If you were to draw a venn diagram between psychic and thespian, “Look Into My Eyes” practically proves it would be a circle. But as the audience and not the clients themselves, we’ll never really know what is true. What is great acting or true clairvoyance? In a Time interview , Wilson says she doesn’t want to try to convince you that this is real, but “I’m trying to give people the emotional experience of being in a psychic reading, and I’m hoping to give people the chance to understand that this is about processing our lives, processing loss, grief, pain and having the space to do that in,” she said.
Wilson’s more reputable films such as the Taylor Swift documentary “Miss Americana” and her limited doc series “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” ask different questions. Where Swift and Shield’s documentaries follow two monumentally popular women asking to be taken seriously about the pleading case for a career change, “Look Into My Eyes” embraces the unordinary rocky approach to living with uncertainty.
By the beauty of True/False, or possibly of fate, my own psychic played their cards for me. After seeing the film in March, I saw Wilson from across the road walking up Ninth St. and immediately left Chipotle to sing my praises and ask my unanswered question.
“Hi, are you Lana Wilson?” I asked rhetorically. I told her I saw her film the night before and loved it. Then the question I’d been dwelling on came to light, but if I disclosed it here, I would just spoil the movie for you.
If you’re looking for an intimate and innately curious documentary on a night in, “Look Into My Eyes” might just fill that niche. Perhaps you and a friend have been thinking about seeing a psychic, or maybe you’re defensive of their practice. Even if you just like the idea that there could be someone out there who can speak to a presence you can’t quite reach, check it out – it’s worth the thought.
“Look Into My Eyes” is available to stream, including for free on sling.tv.
Edited by Ava McCluer | amccluer@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Jayden Bates-Bland and Emma Short | eshort@themaneater.com
Edited by Annie Goodykoontz | agoodykoontz@themaneater.com