The unseen terrain explored in Lana Wilson’s LOOK INTO MY EYES is not what lies on the other side of this mortal veil. In this immensely moving documentary, she takes on something much more profound. She is examining in sometimes raw detail the nature of faith juxtaposed with the overwhelming need for certainty, or at least a few concrete answers, in a world of uncertainty and indifference. By using psychics as her idiom, Wilson, ahem, unveils the uncomfortable place between belief and dismissal in a way that speaks to more than whether or not psychics can contact the dead or see more than the rest of us.
It starts with a doctor seeking respite from something that happened to her 30 years ago; an event that has plagued her and brought a woman of science to a psychic who can answer questions that the scientific method cannot. Over the course of a rich 105 minutes, we meet seven psychics who are suffering from their own, ahem, psychic wounds, and are painfully honest about the pain they have suffered. Coming from many different spiritual traditions, or none at all, they are also refreshingly candid about their gifts, often discovered late in life and cultivated with coursework. Nikenya Hall, who is seen counseling a family that is startled to discover that she knows about how they are being plagued by the spirits of two children, is forthright in confessing that she does not know how she channels the information she shares with clients. She does not know what she is going to say in the moment, only that she is in the position to offer healing in the form of clarity to her clients. She wonders if it’s her imagination at work, and then wonders if what we call imagination is something that comes from outside of us.
And that is true of the others profiled here. We see them in moments of reflection, and with clients, who come seeking closure as well as life advice, even if it’s something that is hurtful. We also see them fail. One can’t contact familiar spirits for a client. Then there is a murky middle ground in which we see Michael Kim offer comfort to an old classmate about a mutual friend who has passed on. That latter is a pointed example of why the healers, which is how these psychics seem themselves, are in need of healing themselves, as emotions well up over memories of the friend who has passed. Is he channeling or saying what both he and that friend need to hear? Does it matter if they find peace as a result? As Ilka Poinheiro, another of the profiled psychics puts it, it’s not that we know more than non-psychics, it’s that we can see a little further around the corner, metaphysically speaking.
Wilson’s camera is a prescient observer. The psychics reveal themselves, from messy kitchens that reflect their messy emotional issues to memories of abusive parents, they share what are usually very private details of their lives and their own questions that, paradoxically, they cannot answer for themselves as they follow their own sometimes elusive dreams. Those that come in search of answers are also revealed in all their vulnerability and need. A woman adopted from China by white parents finds an unexpected connection with Kim, who shares a similar background before telling the woman why her parents abandoned her. The camera lingers on her face as she absorbs the disquieting information with a mixture of sadness and relief. As with all the reading we witness, it is an intimate experience that explains both why people seek answers from psychics, and the healing it offers that can be obtained in no other way.
Poignant, mysterious, and thoroughly engrossing, LOOK INTO MY EYES is a wistful, and sometimes surprising, meditation on the need for connection in a life that, as one psychic says, is hard. It poses philosophical questions that provoke introspection, and it invites us to breathe in, breathe out, and ask ourselves what brings us here today.
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