True/False 2024: Look Into My Eyes reminds us psychics are people, too.

Courtesy A24

The True/False Film Festival is currently running in Columbia, MO. The nationally renowned event brings together many of the year’s most important upcoming documentaries and our film editor Abby Olcese is sharing highlights. Read this year’s other coverage here as it goes live. 

You might expect a documentary about psychics to be a sideshow, either intentionally or unintentionally. But even though it includes a number of funny moments, Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes wants to be taken seriously. How seriously? The opening vignette focuses on a doctor speaking with one of the film’s featured psychics, hoping to contact the spirit of a young girl who died of a gunshot wound under her care, a decades-old death that still haunts her.

This woman is well-groomed and professionally-dressed. She seems like a rational person who doesn’t do this kind of thing often, if at all. But in this moment, she needs to believe some kind of spiritual closure is possible. She’s also emblematic of Wilson’s primary interest in the topic: grief, trauma and what we think we need to move on from them. Most of the psychics Wilson follows and their clients suffer from unresolved loss (of a friend, a family member, a pet or even their own innocence) that feels to them like it can’t be healed by conventional means.

Wilson’s cast of characters are diverse in age, race, identity and even how much they believe in what they do. A John Waters-loving pet psychic brags that she once diagnosed a UTI in a cat (dubiously impressive). Artist Sherrie Lynne once put on a one-woman show titled “Ode to my Love Life,” featuring the showstopper tune “I’m Dating a Mental Illness.” Queer psychic Per Erik sincerely desires to commune with the beyond. Awkward adoptee Michael wants to act, and lives in his late parents’ house with his beloved cat Mr. MacDuffy. Reclusive hoarder Eugene attempts to follow his dream of becoming a singer.

Look Into my Eyes blends elements of a Christopher Guest movie (Sherrie Lynne would be best friends with Corky St. Clair) with the earnest curiosity of Errol Morris to mostly successful results. Wilson never judges her subjects, instead letting their client interactions speak for themselves. Sometimes this leads to wildly funny “you can’t make this up” moments; the pet psychic tells a woman radiating false modesty that birds keep flying into her head because she has a welcoming aura, and the woman nods in knowing agreement. In others, as when Per Erik helps a grieving man connect to his dead relatives with seemingly flawless natural insight, it’s oddly therapeutic.

Is any of this real? Probably not; one of the psychics, a woman with an extensive background studying theater, seems to agree with Wilson that most of what she does is just good improv. But, Wilson suggests, if what they do helps people find the closure they need, is it really all that harmful? Certainly, several of the psychics themselves seem to find some comfort from their own pain in helping their clients move on. 

Wilson’s seeming conclusion that any healing is good healing is a little simplistic, especially if you’re a religious person who believes in an actual spiritual realm. However, there’s something undeniably moving about the human need for connection and for someone out there to understand our experiences, needs and pain. Wilson beautifully illustrates this across her film’s subjects. Like its title suggests, Look Into My Eyes refuses to flatten or easily categorize the people it follows. No matter what individual viewers may think of them, or their profession, they can’t dismiss their full humanity.