Most Nashvillians will know filmmaker Lana Wilson for her Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana (2020). Wilson also directed the Brooke Shields documentary Pretty Baby (2023) as well as an examination of extremism and abortion in America (After Tiller, 2015), and a meditation on suicide in Japanese culture (The Departure, 2017). Wilson’s new movie, Look Into My Eyes reads like a blend of the filmmaker’s curiosities with interesting personalities and particular cultural trends. The movie was released by A24 in September and it’s now streaming on MAX.
Look Into My Eyes is a mosaic portrait of a handful of psychic readers in New York City. We meet them and some of their various clients at actual readings and at the psychics’ homes. One woman connects her clients with the spirits of dead and lost pets, delivering tender messages of canine and feline reassurance in a thick, no-nonsense NYC accent. Another seems to have a knack for directing her clients to personal insights with motherly guidance. Look Into My Eyes puts viewers in the private confines of personal psychic readings where clients explain how they came to seek-out supernatural intervention in the course of asking their questions about fate, spirits and the great beyond. And the film goes one step further, making space for the psychics to tell how they came to their vocations: a gay man and an adoptee point to a sense of alienation as the origins of their psychic sensibilities; several psychics came to cards and candles through their backgrounds as writers, actors and artists.
Look Into My Eyes opens with a long drone camera shot — at least that’s what I thought. The closer I looked the more it seemed like a slow pan-and-zoom over a still image of the New York City skyline at dusk, gradually homing in on a single illuminated window in a high rise apartment. The distinction matters because Look Into My Eyes’ super power is eschewing contemporary documentary cliches in favor of bare-bones techniques and devices that might be more familiar to viewers who remember a time before reality television. Look Into My Eyes isn’t a fly-on-the-wall direct cinema affair – some scenes are clearly set and lit for filming, and there’s lots of sit-down style interviewing. But there’s no text on screen or voiceover narration, and Wilson doesn’t even give us chyrons to identify these psychics and their clients. All relevant information is allowed to flow naturally through the conversations and interviews. Wilson never appears on camera and viewers are never subjected to the lazy horror of the expositional animated montage.
Look Into My Eyes might have been called Look Through My Eyes because it does such a great job of making viewers comfortable with its various subjects, allowing them to relax and spend time listening to the psychics talk about their lives and experiences. The movie never addresses the reality of psychic abilities and it doesn’t prompt the audience to question them either. Wilson is more interested in demonstrating how combinations of talent and trauma, and insight and alienation might bring a person to either side of the psychic reading table after psychology, science and even religion may seem to have run out of answers where grief and failure and heartache are concerned. This picture is funny and fascinating and touching at turns, and it manages to remind you just how interesting and complex everyday people can be. In-between the movie’s intimate interviews and exchanges Wilson fills her screen with vast shots of urban expanse, and monumental architecture looming over city streets, dwarfing the people — and their lives — below. Look Into My Eyes is a film about contemporary loneliness that leaves viewers feeling like we’re all in it together.
Look Into My Eyes is currently streaming on MAX
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.