“Look into my eyes,” a portrait of mediums and their clients, is a non-fiction film whose aim is to observe people, listen to what they say and think about the emotions they feel as they tell their stories.
The film doesn’t identify anyone on screen with printed names and titles. There are no headlines, montages, or other forms of narrative aids. By watching how they interact, you can tell who is the medium and who is the client. It’s the kind of film that communicates what it cares about by the way it gathers and presents information. It seems like the right approach considering the subject matter, which is a profession that many people are skeptical about. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film is a throwback to a different kind of documentary that used to be common fifty or more years ago. It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “artsy” to modern audiences who don’t like old movies and have no point of reference for what they’re watching. Let’s hope that’s not the case, though, because it’s an often profound and moving documentary that grabs your attention in a different way than movies usually do.
We begin with a close-up of a female doctor who has turned to a medium because twenty years earlier, when she was a physician’s assistant at a hospital, she treated a ten-year-old girl who had been killed in a drive-by shooting as she left church with her mother. The woman wants to know if the girl is at peace on the other side. The film cuts to a black screen, leaving us with the woman’s mix of lingering grief and hope. As we get to know several mediums, commonalities emerge. Several were adopted and feel a sense of cultural or racial dislocation that makes them good at reaching clients but also gives them a sense of alienation from the dominant culture. Many are artists. There’s one woman who’s a painter, and several people who are actors or screenwriters or something.
There are times when it seems like mediums are “fishing” or at least struggling, sometimes in a way that suggests charlatanism. Other times they seem to instantly find the exact person the client was hoping to connect with, even though there were no obvious clues that might have helped trick them into doing so. Are mediums really talking to people on the other side? Or are they experiencing an alchemical mix of their own creativity and empathy, a certain “artist’s instinct” (for lack of a better phrase), and an ability to connect with individual clients and with the part of themselves that wants to connect with something beyond the everyday?
A young psychic who seems worried and doubtful has a moment in a session when he says he is visualizing a young man with a skateboard. When the client doesn’t respond to that prompt, he asks the camera crew if any of them had any deep personal connection to a young man with a skateboard, and they didn’t. He apologizes for not being at his best (he blames fatigue) and tries to get the session to continue. In a separate interview, he admits to the filmmakers that he fears he is, essentially, an impostor: someone who thinks he has the gift but doesn’t.
Another of the psychics (who identifies himself later in the film as Michael) rather mortifyingly asks if the dead man a client came to talk to “had trouble breathing” (probably almost everyone who dies has trouble breathing, right?) and is told that the man did in fact hang himself. “That would be a respiratory problem, for sure,” the medium says. “Uh, yeah. How tragic.” The fact that he went to school with the client and didn’t recognize her at first adds to the awkwardness. But then he points out that she had blonde hair back then and goes on to mention the man she’s come to see, a classmate named Brian, unprompted, to which she shows him a photo and other meaningful objects, including a fan.
The film doesn’t take a position on whether psychic phenomena are real, whether there is an afterlife and ghosts/spirits, or whether anything definitive or even measurable is going on in these sessions, beyond some fundamental emotional connections between medium and client. It’s not interested in proving or disproving anything. It’s interested in why people go to or 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 conversation and in our chain of thoughts and feelings. You hear clients summarizing why they have come to visit a medium, and there will be a pause while the medium processes the information, then another pause after the medium asks follow-up questions and attempts to contact the spirit the client wants to communicate with.
The play of emotions on the faces of clients and mediums is a spectacle in itself. Movies no longer often have the patience to simply sit and stare at people’s faces, unless it’s for a spectacular close-up of a movie star expressing his emotions. Parts of this film seem to rediscover the reason close-ups were created.
The medium who experiences a moment of shame during a session says that what moves him most is the desire to connect with something bigger than himself. That’s how everyone is.
One of the most fascinating observations that emerges is that all mediums are, to a greater or lesser degree, incredibly self-centered and genuinely empathetic and outward-oriented. There is not a single one who does not seem genuinely interested in hearing clients’ stories and helping them find peace. Of course, the impulse always comes from somewhere.
One of the most powerful threads in the film is a series of visits to a medium who is also a writer, actor and film buff. His house is… well, “messy” is too mild a word. Messy. He realizes this and is embarrassed to the point of asking the crew to please not point the camera at his bedroom, because it is even worse than the rooms we have been allowed to see. He says that one of his favorite movies is Walter Salles’ “Central Station,” about an older woman who befriends a young man in need, and his other favorite movie is “Ordinary People.” When he starts to go into detail about why he loves these two movies, he bursts into tears. He is suffering, just like his clients.
Everyone is hurting. Perhaps that is the most important point of the film. We all carry the burden of agonizing personal experiences, and whether people instantly see through it or not depends on how well we handle and/or channel the pain. This becomes even clearer in a final section that brings all the mediums together for their group therapy session where they can talk about their work and connect.
“It’s not completely selfless,” says another medium. “In fact, it’s not selfless at all. Everyone gets a healing.”
Cinema is a medium, in both senses of the word: it connects people with other people and the living with the dead.