“Look Into My Eyes” opens with an unexpectedly sobering, even provocative encounter for a documentary about New York Metropolis psychics and their clientele: not a whimsical palm studying or a conjuring of a misplaced beloved one, however an try to reckon with long-festering skilled trauma. A middle-aged feminine physician, sharply dressed, talks on to digicam — or slightly, to the mystic sitting silently behind it — concerning the time, as a junior physician on the emergency ward, she attended to a 10-year-old lady who was shot upon leaving church, and died of her wounds in hospital. The tragedy hasn’t left her thoughts within the 20 intervening years; searching for closure, she resorts to most unscientific strategies. Can the psychic attain the younger sufferer, she asks, and discover out if she’s at peace?

Viewers will react in quite a lot of methods to this odd, upsetting request. Some could discover it poignant, others totally unseemly, and that’s earlier than we get to the numerous perceptions of psychics themselves: as uncannily gifted healers, performative charlatans, or one thing therapeutically in between. “Look Into My Eyes” entertains all these potentialities with out being particularly involved with moderating that debate. Of markedly extra curiosity to Wilson — returning efficiently to extra low-key human portraiture after two shiny movie star research, “Fairly Child: Brooke Shields” and the Taylor Swift-focused “Miss Americana” — is how these allegedly second-sighted folks operate on an on a regular basis foundation, and what drives abnormal individuals of many various persuasions to hunt out their providers.

The ensuing movie, an A24 manufacturing launched at Sundance, walks a deft line between the ironic and the truthfully receptive: Hardline skeptics will probably be entertained, others peculiarly affected. A mild pressure of humor, in the meantime, spans the divide. You needn’t have a agency stance on the afterlife and its accessibility to be tickled by a pet medium bragging that she might diagnose a cat’s urinary tract an infection via sheer telepathy.

The seven psychics that Wilson has assembled to interview and observe are a various group — 4 of them ladies, three males; 4 individuals of colour, three white — with an equally diversified vary of approaches to their chosen calling, from New Age-y solemnity to fairground-style showmanship and sparkle. (That might be Sherrie Lynne, who attire for work in a surfeit of bohemian bangles and scarves, brazenly acknowledging the artifice and theatrics of a spiel she largely performs at events.) What they principally have in widespread is a shared curiosity within the arts: That a number of of them are aspiring actors or writers is a element that cynics will relish.

But not one of the topics seems to brings any cynicism to the desk — at the same time as a few them, intriguingly, admit they might not have paranormal capabilities. Sherrie cheerfully cites the usefulness of her thespian coaching when doing readings, whereas queer psychic Per Erik Borja confesses, “I by no means totally imagine within the issues I say.” Nonetheless, their consultations with shoppers, lots of whom are susceptible and determined to regain lacking connections, are marked by honest human engagement and eagerness to heal. A number of the appointments — filmed on naked units in clear, flat close-up, an aesthetic selection that stresses each their separation from actuality and their plain emotional stakes — unfold in lethal earnest. In others, one senses each psychic and consumer constructing a shared fiction that nonetheless brings consolation. “If it resonates with the particular person I’m speaking to, then it doesn’t fucking matter,” one shrugs.

Finally, nevertheless, Wilson and DP Stephen Maing transfer previous these formally constructed sequences of the psychics in session to probe their personal lives, adopting hotter, looser vérité framing within the course of. It’s right here, within the privateness of their very own New York residences — some shrine-like of their tidiness, others cluttered shoeboxes — that their very own emotional frailties come to the fore. And they also let free about familial resentments, dangerous breakups, long-term grief and crises of both religion or atheism, all elements in steering them towards their unusual line of labor.

Wilson is an unobtrusive however subtly penetrating interviewer: She will get disarming candor even from an outwardly anxious topic like Eugene Grygo, a trauma-burdened soul who isn’t essentially the most assured of the psychics, however comes into his personal when speaking about motion pictures (Walter Salles’ arthouse tearjerker “Central Station” is a favourite) or, considerably surprisingly, crooning Billy Joel or The Beatles at open-mic nights. Psychics, it seems, are simply common broken individuals with, maybe, a much less typical coping technique than most. Sure, additionally they see psychics themselves; a bunch remedy session between the seven brings proceedings to a slightly tender climax.

With this view behind the scenes, the session scenes start to tackle a higher naturalism. The 2 modes merge in a transferring, mordantly humorous scene the place younger Asian-American psychic Michael Kim is shocked to seek out his subsequent consumer is an outdated classmate, searching for a line to a useless mutual acquaintance. He’s sufficiently thrown off his sport to supply clumsier counsel than standard: In a single notably awkward second, his question as as to whether the useless man had “respiratory points” is answered by the revelation that he hanged himself. And but their assembly, cosmically assisted or not, in the end proves brazenly conversational, even cathartic. Does it matter in the event that they contact the past or not? Agnostic however empathetic, Wilson’s movie suggests communing with the useless may be a roundabout approach of reaching the residing.