Are Psychics Real? Does That Even Matter to Them? How A24’s Doc ‘Look Into My Eyes’ Goes Beyond Truth Following New York’s Paranormal Practitioners

Not many documentaries have to account for an audience that will assume the subject matter is bullshit. But filmmaker Lana Wilson was primed to take on that challenge when she chose to begin capturing the emotionally charged alchemy of psychics practicing in New York City. After all, she was an admitted skeptic herself. Even so, she found herself in the office of a psychic seeking answers in the wake of the 2016 election.

'Look Into My Eyes' Trailer: A24-Produced Doc Explores the Strange World of New York Psychics

“I couldn’t believe I was walking in there. I was never a religious person,” Wilson shares over Zoom. “Yet this day, I found myself going to a psychic for comfort — and I did feel comforted. And I thought, ‘What does it mean that I just felt better after I talked to this stranger for five minutes?’”

That question grew in Wilson’s mind for several years while she made behind-the-curtain documentaries about Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields. Her quest for answers came into view with “Look Into My Eyes,” out in New York from A24 on Friday with an expansion next week. In the doc, seven psychics allow the camera into their sessions — the happy customers and the dead ends alike — and open up about their private histories and what led them to their unique practice. Some of them even confess that they don’t believe they possess paranormal abilities at all. Another specializes in pets, and claims to have once diagnosed a feline urinary tract infection through telepathy.

“Personally, I’m all for a viewing experience where there’s doubt, where there’s dubiousness, where you’re kind of uncomfortable,” Wilson says. “Even if you think this is artificial, you can still have this real emotional experience. That’s how I feel if I go to see a play. This is all fake and all contrived, yet I’m having a very real, vivid experience that’s incredibly meaningful.”

Shot during the COVID pandemic, the production began with an intense casting process that saw Wilson and her crew meet with over 150 psychics across the five boroughs – armed with a personal reading request for each of them. Some storefront practitioners produced dry, fortune cookie messages (“You will be the mother to twins.” “You are very ambitious.” “You will go to Los Angeles”). But Wilson was keen to find individuals who strived to make serious, meaningful connections with their clients — many of whom already knew each other and would regularly meet for group seances.

“They are undeniably people who are not just trying to make money. They’re sincerely trying to connect and they’re trying to give some sort of comforting or healing experience to the person they’re sitting with,” Wilson says. Then she adds, “I didn’t tell them we were making a documentary at first, because I didn’t want to attract aspiring actors. Whenever you do a documentary casting process, I find that aspiring actors show up.”

Nonetheless, Wilson found herself casting psychics with creative backgrounds. One of them espouses her adoration of John Waters, another works away at scripts amid an office filled with printed screenplays. A cynic could find validation in that motif of aspiring artists, but that interplay between fictional storytelling and psychic instinct is one in which Wilson found a certain kinship.

“Maybe I’m just drawn to people who remind me of myself,” Wilson half-jokes. “You want to make a film with someone who you enjoy spending time with. I like talking to them about movies. We had a lot in common.”

After the cast was set, the production began preparing its set piece sessions, advertising free readings across the city and meeting with prospective clients over Zoom before matchmaking them to a psychic. The schedule hit a snag when one patient bailed at the last minute, leading Wilson’s camera assistant to ask a friend down the street to come in for a reading. The fill-in turned out to be the clairvoyant’s former classmate. Together, the two attempt to reach a peer who died by suicide: a surprise reunion that begins as pitch black cringe comedy and transforms into a determined communion of vulnerability.

Lana Wilson's Sundance Film 'Look Into My Eyes,' About Psychics in New York, Boarded by Dogwoof (EXCLUSIVE)

“Even though someone’s gone, you are still connected to them. You are still in a relationship to them because they’re still affecting you,” Wilson says. “There’s so many things that we believe in that we don’t see. That stuff is important to us as humans, because we’re living in a world that, on the surface, makes no sense. It is terrifying. There is no meaning in it. And we have to find ways to survive as humans, to find meaning, and to find a template for organizing morality and our thoughts.”

Wilson compares the paranormal practice to organized faith, noting how several of the film’s subjects came from religious backgrounds but left their respective organizations after disagreeing with certain conservative values. Conspicuously, the community seen in “Look Into My Eyes” appears to draw a large number of LGBTQ individuals, both as clients and as psychics.

“They all had a kind of formative experience with loss or with some kind of trauma,” Wilson says. “In some cases, that is what led them to seek out a psychic themselves.”

Wilson draws on the irrationality of trauma in the doc’s disarming opening sequence: an E.R. doctor asking to communicate with a young girl that she saw die from a gunshot wound decades before. The patient’s monologue is intense and shaky — a provocative first impression that Wilson hopes gets dubious viewers immediately invested.

“You can’t tell if it’s a therapy session or what. You have no idea. It also looks like a documentary interview. And you think, ‘Is this an expert being interviewed for a documentary?’ You don’t know,” Wilson says. “It’s hearing this scientific, rational doctor assume that there is an afterlife and that that afterlife is reachable. Opening with something unexpected is the number one way of accounting for the assumption that a lot of people who come to watch the movie will be skeptical.”

The playful reveal that the doctor’s speech is a preamble to a reading request foretell the true interests of “Look Into My Eyes”: the odd but engaging labor of the psychics and the connection that they work to foster with their clients, as opposed to whatever may seem more real outside of the room.

“I did explore a little bit of talking to clients after their sessions, but putting that into a verbal explanation just corrupted the experience of the film,” Wilson says. “It just becomes about: is this real or not? It’s too straightforward. If the psychic predicted something, it came true or it didn’t. Eh! That’s too simple.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

'Look Into My Eyes' Review: Psychics Shed the Mystique in a Funny, Compassionate Doc Portrait