Critic Reviews

It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “arty” to modern audiences who aren’t into older movies and have no reference point for what they’re watching. Hopefully not, though, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that engages your attention differently than movies usually do.

The resulting film is truly as real as it gets. For a movie about the apparent world beyond our own, that’s saying more than any psychic could ever predict

What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.

Human connections are gifts, imagination is powerful and empathy isn’t a trick. These are the things Look Into My Eyes patiently communicates to us from its watchful perch.

Ms. Wilson may put a viewer off balance with a lack of concrete detail, but it is a seduction technique that works, to satisfying effect.

There are similar beautiful moments checkered across this five-borough endeavor.

Entrancing from the start but slow to reveal the full scope of Wilson’s vision, Look Into My Eyes locks into that furtively cinematic essence by framing its psychic readings with a stiff naturalism that recalls the interview scenes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life.”

All of the psychics are sensitive, artistic, outcasted people, who are more empathetic to the feelings of others than the average person might be. It makes their readings a space not just for potential supernatural experience, but one in which someone who is vulnerable and emotionally in need is being heard by someone who’s willing to receive them.

While Wilson stays resolutely — and perhaps for some frustratingly — neutral about whether that link is forged by lived experience or spiritual ability, her film can be read as a celebration of human empathy and the power of shared connection.

[Its] genuine focus is the emotional turmoil that drives people to practice this profession as well as to patronize its “experts” in search of guidance and insights into the biggest questions of their lives.