‘Look Into My Eyes’ Trailer: Lana Wilson’s Psychic Documentary Delivers a Crystal Ball of Empathy

Famed documentarian Lana Wilson has taken on her most ambitious subject yet: the past, the present, and especially the future, as told by psychics.

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The “Miss Americana,” “The Departure,” and “After Tiller” director’s “Look Into My Eyes” follows a group of New York City psychics as they conduct readings for their clients, “revealing a kaleidoscope of loneliness, connection, and healing,” per the logline.

The film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and was later acquired by distributor A24.

Wilson told IndieWire at the festival that she was inspired to explore the psychic industry while in production on another documentary that overlapped with the 2016 election. Wilson stumbled into a psychic’s booth while on location, and realized how fascinating the psychic subculture is.

“I guess I thought as psychics much more trivially than that, like a silly thing to do at a party,” Wilson said in our studio . “And that was the moment for me where I thought, ‘Wow, this can be a film inside psychic sessions with a really profound way at looking at the wash of humanity and all of their questions.’”

Wilson noted how those seeking out psychics are usually at a “real crossroads in their lives.”

“Psychics are a very New York-y thing but the sessions are dry and short. I found myself drawn to the psychics operating more in the intersection of psychotherapy, doing these long hour-and-a-half long deep dives,” Wilson said.

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The clients she connected with the most were like “fun house mirror reflections” of herself, Wilson said.

And she found a number of parallels between her job and the subject matter.

“The psychics are really there witnessing their client, who wants to be told a story of themselves,” Wilson said. “The psychics are holding it up to their client, and I think that’s what I’m really doing as a documentary filmmaker. I’m witnessing someone and holding a mirror up to them and reflecting what I see.”

She concluded, “Religious belief systems, a psychic reading, and art are all places we go to make sense of the world and understand who we are as humans. Documentary, for example, is all a construct. It is all artificial, but at the same time it’s real. Just because something is constructed doesn’t mean it can’t be real.”

“Look Into My Eyes” premieres September 16 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.