‘Look Into My Eyes’ Review: Psychics Shed the Mystique In a Funny, Compassionate Doc Portrait
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic “Look Into My Eyes” opens with an unexpectedly sobering, even provocative encounter for a documentary about New York City psychics and their clientele: not a fanciful palm reading or a conjuring of a lost loved one, but an attempt to reckon with long-festering professional trauma.
A middle-aged female doctor, sharply dressed, talks directly to camera — or rather, to the mystic sitting silently behind it — about the time, as a junior doctor on the emergency ward, she attended to a 10-year-old girl who was shot upon leaving church, and died of her wounds in hospital.
The tragedy hasn’t left her mind in the 20 intervening years; seeking closure, she resorts to most unscientific methods. Can the psychic reach the young victim, she asks, and find out if she’s at peace?
Viewers will react in a variety of ways to this odd, upsetting request. Some may find it poignant, others thoroughly unseemly, and that’s before we get to the varied perceptions of psychics themselves: as uncannily gifted healers, performative charlatans, or something therapeutically in between. “Look Into My Eyes” entertains all these possibilities without being especially concerned with moderating that debate.
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