Film review of “Look into my eyes” (2024)

A portrait of media and their clients, Look Me in the Eyes is a documentary film about observing people, listening to them and reflecting on the emotions they experience when telling their stories.

The film doesn’t identify anyone on screen through printed names and titles. There are no headlines, montages, or other forms of narrative aid. By watching them interact, you figure out who is the medium and who is the customer. It’s the kind of film that conveys the essence through the way it gathers and presents information. That seems like the right approach, considering the subject matter, a profession that many people are skeptical about. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film is a throwback to another kind of documentary that was common 50 or more years ago. To a modern audience uninterested in older films and lacking a reference point for what they’re watching, it may seem fragmented, elusive, or “artsy.” Hopefully not, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that will hold your attention in a different way that movies usually do.

We begin with a close-up of a doctor who has gone to see a medium because twenty years ago, when she was a resident at a hospital, she treated a ten-year-old girl who was killed in a drive-by shooting as she left church with her mother. The woman wants to know if the girl found peace on the other side. The film cuts to a black screen, leaving us with the woman’s mix of lingering pain and hope. As we meet various mediums, commonalities emerge. Some were adopted and feel a kind of cultural or racial rootlessness that allows them to relate well to clients but also gives them a sense of alienation from the dominant culture. Many are artists. There is a woman who is a painter and several people who are actors, screenwriters, or a mix of both.

There are moments when it seems as though the mediums are “fishing,” or at least fighting, sometimes in a way that resembles charlatanism. Other times, they seem to instantly find exactly the person the client wanted to contact, despite there being no obvious clues that could have helped them gain access. Are the mediums actually talking to people on the other side? Or are they experiencing an alchemical mix of their own creativity and empathy, a certain “performer instinct” (for lack of a better phrase), and the ability to connect with individual clients and the part of themselves that wants to connect with something beyond the mundane?

A young psychic, who seems troubled and full of doubt, has a moment during a session where he says he sees a young man with a skateboard in front of him. When the client doesn’t respond to this prompt, he asks the camera crew if any of them had a deep personal connection with a young man with a skateboard, and they didn’t. He apologizes for his clumsiness (blaming it on tiredness) and tries to keep the session going. In a separate interview, he admits to the filmmakers that he’s basically afraid of being an imposter – someone who thinks they have the gift but isn’t.

Another of the psychics (he later reveals himself to be Michael in the film) asks, rather embarrassed, if the dead man a client wanted to speak to had “breathing problems” (probably almost everyone who dies has breathing problems, right?), and is told that the man did indeed hang himself. “That would definitely be a breathing problem,” says the psychic. “Uh, yeah. So tragic.” The fact that he went to school with the client and didn’t recognize her at first makes the awkwardness even worse. But then he notices that she had blonde hair back then, and mentions the man she wanted to visit, a classmate named Brian, without prompting, whereupon she produces a photograph and other significant items, including a fan.

The film takes no position on whether psychic phenomena are real, whether there is an afterlife and ghosts, or whether anything specific or even measurable happens in these sessions, apart from some basic emotional connections between medium and client. It is not interested in proving or disproving anything. It is interested in why people go to/become mediums and what happens in the rooms during the sessions.

Wilson and editor Hannah Buck work much of their magic through ellipses: the pauses, hesitations and silences in conversations and in our chain of thoughts and feelings. You listen to clients summarize why they’ve come to a medium, and then there’s a pause while the medium processes the information, then another pause after asking more questions and trying to make contact with the spirit the client wants to communicate with.

The play of emotions on the faces of customers and media is a show in itself. In movies, people generally no longer have the patience to just sit and look at people’s faces, unless it’s a stunning close-up of an emotional movie star in a long take. Parts of this film seem to rediscover the reason for the creation of close-ups.

The medium who experiences an embarrassing moment during a reading says that, above all, he is driven by the desire to connect with something greater than himself. This happens to everyone.

One of the most fascinating observations is that all media are, to varying degrees, both incredibly self-centered and genuinely other-driven and empathetic. There isn’t a single one that doesn’t seem genuinely interested in hearing clients’ stories and helping them find peace. Of course, the impulse always comes from somewhere.

One of the film’s most poignant plot lines is a series of visits to a medium who is also a writer, actor, and film buff. His home is – well, “cluttered” is too mild a word. Messy. He recognizes this, and is so embarrassed that he asks the crew not to focus the camera on his bedroom, because it’s even worse than any of the rooms we’ve seen so far. He says one of his favorite films is Walter Salles’ Central Station, about an elderly woman who befriends a boy in distress, and his other favorite is Ordinary Family. When he starts to go into detail about why he loves those two films, he bursts into tears. He’s suffering, just like his clients.

Everyone is suffering. That is perhaps the real point of the film. We all carry the burden of painful personal experiences, and whether or not people recognize that immediately depends on how well we handle and/or channel the pain. This becomes even clearer in a later section where all the media come together for their group therapy session where they can talk about their work and network.

“It’s not entirely selfless,” says another medium. “Actually, it’s not selfless at all. Everyone experiences healing.”

Cinema is a medium in the double sense of the word: it connects people with other people and the living with the dead.