On Nov. 9, 2016, the morning after Donald Trump was elected president, a despondent Lana Wilson noticed a storefront sign advertising $5 psychic readings. She’d never visited a psychic before, but what’s that old saying about desperate times? Like a siren lured to wreckage by song, Wilson wandered in. Soon enough, she got the idea for her next documentary.
At that point, Wilson had already made one film about patient-healer relationships—2013's After Tiller, which chronicled third-trimester abortion providers—and was finishing another that profiled a self-destructive Buddhist monk who counsels the suicidal. Even as she embarked on two glossy celebrity documentaries, Taylor Swift's Miss Americana and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, Wilson kept returning to the idea of psychics. In a way, she realized, they’re healers too, albeit ones with fuzzy qualifications and few regulations.
“There’s something really powerful and valuable in a stranger looking at you and telling a story about your life,” Wilson tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “We need witnesses to better see ourselves.”
The resulting documentary, Look Into My Eyes, premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival. (An A24 production, the movie is seeking distribution.) It follows several New York City psychics as they give readings to new clients, many ending in some sort of emotional catharsis. In the film, sessions unfold like quick-hit therapy, condensing months’ worth of psychoanalysis into a pithy 60 minutes that happen to channel the dead or synthesize a person’s complicated interior life. Sometimes it’s stunning how thoroughly psychics can pinpoint a person’s pain. Other times, what they come up with sounds completely bogus. Look Into My Eyes is humorous, wistful, and suffused with a healthy blend of skepticism and reverence.
Wilson started working on the movie in earnest during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, at which point Miss Americana had premiered on Netflix. She and her researchers scoured New York’s five boroughs, on foot and online, looking for psychics who might make good subjects. Together, they had somewhere between 100 and 150 readings. The storefront mediums, Wilson says, tended to be “quick and dry,” speaking in easily deduced generalities. But every so often, she and her team would encounter somebody who went deeper, somebody who appeared to have a palpable facility for this stuff. One was a licensed counselor, and a few had performance backgrounds. Others, including a once-reclusive pet psychic with a passion for Parker Posey movies (relatable), came from troubled backgrounds and found rejuvenation through paranormal communion.
Once Wilson had selected her psychics, she went about pairing them with clients. She dispatched interns to advertise free readings in parks and outside grocery stores. Those willing to have their sessions filmed—roughly half, Wilson estimates—met with the film’s producers beforehand so they’d know what they were signing up for. The psychics usually had no idea who they’d meet next, Wilson says. The goal wasn’t to prove or disprove their legitimacy but to capture intimate exchanges between strangers.
"All of these psychics are genuinely trying to connect to something bigger than themselves and share that with another person," she says. "That's what I found so endearing about them. What is the difference between theater improv and a psychic session? I don't think it matters because what's happening in the room is two human beings connecting to each other. Psychic readings, like a religious belief system and also like art, are ways to help us process our lives and process the world."
During the sessions, the only outsider in the room was the film's cinematographer, Stephen Maing. (He also directed this year's Sundance documentary Union, which depicts a coterie of Amazon employees attempting to unionize.) Maing filmed the psychics himself and set up small, unmanned cameras to capture the clients. That way, they wouldn't feel so observed. Wilson and the rest of the crew were stationed in another room or behind a curtain, allowing for an unobtrusive vérité format. As a whole, Look Into My Eyes bypasses most nonfiction gimmicks. There are no digests outlining the history of mediums and no pat summations telling the viewer how to process what they're seeing.
One psychic attempts to channel a boy who liked skateboarding. When the client says she knew no such person, the psychic asks if anyone else witnessing the session relates to that description. No luck. He then announces that his energy is zapped. Is it because conjuring the dead is hard work, or is he embarrassed to be so off-base? In a sense, questions of efficacy haunt psychics the same way they would any profession. "I wanted to structure the film in a way that you can come in being a skeptic or a believer," Wilson says. "You're seeing really magical moments that are hard to explain, but then you're also seeing moments when the psychic is not connecting or when they feel like failures. Sometimes psychics say, ‘I wonder if this is real,’ and expressing those doubts directly is so important."
Late in the film, Wilson brings the featured psychics together for what's called a message circle, in which a group performs readings that double as a sort of life-coaching marathon. Some of them already knew one another, having formed a tribe of like-minded specialists whose services go above and beyond their $5 counterparts. Many of them, it turned out, also shared an interest in books, film, and the other topics that Wilson gravitates to. The commonalities among the participants and their director continued to blossom, almost like the whole project constituted one big spiritual web.
“Rather than religion, it’s been movies, books, and art that have been my go-to to understand the world and find meaning,” Wilson says. “I’ve noticed, sometimes, sitting in a movie theater, I can have an experience that’s more vivid than my real life. I can feel more emotional. Have you ever heard people say, ‘I cry more in a movie theater?’ That's a totally constructed, artificial experience, yet your emotions are real. With psychic readings, you can say it’s artificial, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real or that it’s not meaningful. That’s what I found so interesting to explore in this film.”
