Film Review: LOOK INTO MY EYES (2024): Lana Wilson’s Documentary Examines the Quest for Difficult Answers by Ordinary People

Look Into My Eyes Review

Look Into My Eyes (2024) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Lana Wilson.

One of the men featured in the new documentary focused on psychics, Look Into My Eyes, discusses the impact made by the Oscar-winning 1980 film, Ordinary People. Filmmaker Lana Wilson’s new documentary could well be called Ordinary People as well because there’s nothing extraordinary about the folks the movie displays on-screen. Of course, the otherworldly answers these people seek are what makes them interesting. Wilson’s movie works better the more it goes on but the approach to the material is not necessarily the most intriguing one that could have been taken. Nevertheless, psychics and their clients feed off one another in a very realistic way here and capturing that is the most successful aspect of Wilson’s probing documentary which has plenty of intimate moments of personal discussions that will hold viewers’ attention.

This movie initially chronicles several New York psychic sessions that have a lot of curiosity factor to them even if the movie juggles the quest for answers by too many different people to be fully effective. There’s a lot going on emotionally for these folks and the movie can feel incomplete at times. The answers, themselves, by the psychics are sporadically iffy. The psychics can feel like they’re “fishing” to get the right path to take their “revelations,” but the movie isn’t about whether or not the clients are being duped. They may well receive accurate answers for all I know. This movie makes no judgments either way.

It opens with a woman/nurse inquiring about a young child who died of a bullet wound and follows through on other dilemmas with different clients. One of the most fascinating ones is a woman who claims her parents were narcissistic and that they didn’t take interest in their daughter’s talent until it was too late. Living the life of an artist is a difficult one and when we dig deep inside the troubled life of one, there are some very disturbing possibilities that the movie has in store for its audience.

It’s heartbreaking when an adopted girl wonders if her parents really think about her at all. The psychic on hand answers that there may have been some selfishness on behalf of one of the parents in terms of giving the child up for adoption. Psychics are sometimes forced to give difficult answers to their clients and ask their clients if they can handle that before revealing such potentially devastating information to them.

Another interesting situation revolves around a man getting vocal training in the movie. As the film displays this person’s abilities and his female instructor, it gets more and more bizarre, but it may be hard to take one’s eyes off the screen. It’s almost like we’re seeing things we aren’t supposed to all throughout the movie which is what ultimately makes Look Into My Eyes a good film. When the movie digs into the actions of a pet, it’s at its best as it starts to get into territory regarding the feelings of animals which is absolutely thought-provoking stuff. Since we’re dealing with ordinary people, some questions that these folks deserve answers to should certainly be handled in a sensitive manner. Whether they’re real or imaginary, these answers can help people cope, I suppose.

Visiting a psychic never interested me before but after seeing this movie, I’d be curious to see what they would have to say about several different things going on in the world.  What’s revealed in Look Into My Eyes can definitely make one want to seek answers to personal questions.

Where Look Into My Eyes falters a bit is in its early use of keeping the camera focused on the person talking (usually the client) about their difficult experience or question. This choice tends to make the people look more nervous about the topics they discuss, and it feels like a disservice to the people speaking at times. The movie gets more creative at certain points, also showing a bigger part of the outside world beyond the sessions, but still. This film could have benefitted from a different approach to showing the stories the people in the movie choose to share about their lives. It’s still a good movie but it feels too ordinary at times for a movie about things so extraordinary.

Look Into My Eyes offers some in-depth insights into the way people think and the questions they seek answers to. It doesn’t provide definitive answers as to what these people want to know (or hear) but definitively displays the humanity of these people who ask the hard questions for better or worse. On that particular regard, the movie is a success.

Rating: 7/10

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