At one point in “Look Into My Eyes,” director Lana Wilson asks Per Erik Borja, one of the New York-based psychics she tracks why he’s drawn to horror films as he watches a trailer for “Barbarian” on his laptop. He believes it has something to do with a broader interest in isolated characters and “how they have to find something within to help them survive,” though he also loves how outsiders can find their people in such films when his favorite is “‘The Witch,’ even though the people are a coven that eats children.”
One could argue that Per Erik has found a tribe that’s not too much more reputable in the typically derided profession of being a medium, but Wilson sees something else in her magnificent fourth feature, which seems like something she’s been working towards since her first. While the director has a knack for inviting audiences into private worlds very different from one another, whether in the abortion clinic in “After Tiller,” the practice of a Zen Buddhist who talks people away from suicide in “The Departure” and an audience with Taylor Swift in “Miss Americana,” the settings may be different, but the animating idea behind them has largely been the same as she’s accompanied subjects through confronting their biggest fears and usually, with the help of another, find their way through.
“Look Into My Eyes” begins with a series of those who have come for a psychic reading and recount some of the worst memories in their life to gain closure on what happened, from a doctor who treated a 10-year-old for a gunshot wound to a young Chinese adoptee who wonders about who her biological parents were. All seem less invested in what they’ll hear than the fact someone is listening to them, able to share personal things that they might not want to be psychoanalyzed and the thought of some affirmation from beyond is appealing, but to be acknowledged in the present will be worth their money’s worth. The camera remains trained on one side of the conversations until swinging dramatically to the other side towards the psychics, nearly all of them who came by their current occupation after a flirtation with the arts and do little to disabuse anyone of the notion that what they do is a performance, yet the rewards of that work for both them and their clientele are as easily summoned by Wilson as the practitioners conjuring distant spirits.
As one could expect, these are all fascinating characters that Wilson comes into contact with, particularly Susie, who discovered a gift for communicating with animals after beating a drug habit she shared with her father in high school, and Nikemya, who was reminded of the feeling she had in church as a young girl growing up in Oklahoma after attending a seance with her friend in New York. The act of engaging others becomes an act of compassion that they appear to wish someone would show them and “Look Into My Eyes” gently allows for their work to be looked at through the lens of their personal experience once the film starts moving between appointments and sit-down interviews.
Though it moves towards a gathering of the psychics talking to one another, editor Hannah Buck has put together a wily structure in which the willingness to discuss things seems like a breakthrough enough to propel it forward and filmed in benign settings like back porches and unadorned offices than are a far cry from the darkened rooms draped in curtains that one might assume (yet candles are a constant presence), the space simultaneously feels airy and anxious, putting the connections that clients make with the person in front of them have the same import as with the loved ones they’re trying to reach. The result is alternately sobering and vital and what’s unquestionable about “Look Into My Eyes,” is the ability of both the filmmaker, one of the best working today, and her subjects to make people feel less alone.
“Look Into My Eyes” will be released by A24 at some later date.