'Look Into My Eyes' finds an unhappy medium
Moving documentary gazes into the private lives of psychics.
If you’re looking to have your opinions about psychics either proven or disproven, the documentary “Look Into My Eyes” will not help you. Filmmaker Lana Wilson is just as uninterested in playing the Amazing Randi, debunking the idea that psychics can contact the dead, as she is in accepting their alleged paranormal gifts wholesale.
Instead, “Look Into My Eyes” focuses not on the supernatural, but the natural. Who are these people, who make a living sitting eye-to-eye with the grief-stricken and bereaved, and offering comfort for a fee? And what grief do they carry home with them alone? It turns out to be a much more fascinating question in this haunting and empathetic film.
For the first 20 minutes or so, the film presents a series of psychic readings, and the sessions often follow a similar pattern – part parlor trick, part therapy session. The psychics bring up details about the loved ones (“I’m seeing a jean jacket”) to earn their customers’ trust that they really have made contact with the afterlife.
Then they deliver messages from the departed – messages that the grieving clearly need to hear. Sometimes the departed aren’t even dead – one first-generation Chinese-American, adopted when she was a baby, wonders about her birth parents. Other times they aren’t even human, as a young man wonders about the fate of the bearded dragon he gave up for adoption.
It’s impossible not to feel conflicted watching these sessions – what are the odds that that person was wearing a jean jacket on an easily discoverable Facebook photo? And there are moments that it is hard not to roll your eyes at, such as the pet psychic who insists that wild birds are drawn to her client. Yet it’s undeniable that these sessions can bring comfort to the clients as well, comfort that they can’t find through earthly means.
“Look Into My Eyes” really gets interesting when Wilson looks into the private lives of the psychics, and finds them to be just as ordinary and messy as their clients. One middle-aged man in a cluttered apartment is still grieving over the loss of his younger brother decades earlier. Others talk about the traumas of their pasts, and how they felt lost and unmoored until they “discovered” this gift. One says flatly that he wonders if he’s a fake, that the visions that come to him are just intuition.
In other words, they all seem to be looking for human connection as much as their clients are. Wilson films them all with non-judgmental empathy, with the subjects looking straight at or just past the lens in interviews. (The films of Errol Morris must be a key influence, particularly “Gates of Heaven.”)
I felt for everybody on screen, the deluded and the deluding, all reaching out to each other. As one psychic says to several of the others during a group session, “Sometimes it’s the healers who need the most healing.” Again, “Look Into My Eyes” won’t change your opinion of psychics either way, but it will help you see them as fellow human beings.
“Look Into My Eyes” is now in theaters. In Madison, it has a one-time-only showing at 7 p.m. tonight at the UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall.
I very much agree with you Rob. I think the filmmaker deliberately let us make our own decisions about the credibility of these psychics. Their own backgrounds were pretty interesting though.