documentaries, Eugene Grygo, Ilka Pinheiro, Lana Wilson, Look Into My Eyes, Michael Kim, movies, Nikenya Hall, Per Erik Borja, Phoebe Hoffman, reviews, Sherrie Lynne, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival
September 6, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Lana Wilson
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City, the documentary film “Look Into My Eyes” features a racially diverse group of people (white, African American, Asian and Latin) who are involved in some way in giving or receiving psychic readings.
Culture Clash: The seven psychics featured in the movie grapple with their own emotional baggage, trauma and self-doubt while they are in the business of comforting others.
Culture Audience: “Look Into My Eyes” will appeal mainly to people who are interested in watching documentaries about human psychology, whether viewers believe in psychics or not.
“Look Into My Eyes” is not a journalistic exposé about people who claim to be psychics. This empathetic documentary about seven self-proclaimed psychics in New York City ignores the reality that con artists can use personal information that people put on social media. This movie is mostly about people wanting emotional validation from strangers. Skeptics might be amused by some of the guessing games and performances that show the so-called psychics fumbling to say things that their customers want to hear. Believers will be enthralled and will be reluctant to question the credibility of the self-appointed psychics. It’s perhaps no coincidence that all of the psychics featured in this documentary are aspiring or failed entertainers.
Directed by Lana Wilson, “Look Into My Eyes” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary is a series of scenes that alternate between two types of footage: (1) readings that the seven psychics do for their customers, who are not identified by their names in the documentary and (2) interviews and leisure time with the psychics, who talk about their own personal lives. All of the psychics featured in “Look Into My Eyes” claim to be able to see and communicate with the dead.
What the documentary uncovers about these seven psychics is that almost all of them are deeply insecure, emotionally damaged, and struggling with various issues, such as mental health, addiction recovery and/or financial instability. But they are also very good at talking and giving people the type of comfort that these customers are seeking, which is the real motivation for anyone to take a psychic seriously. “Look Into My Eyes” does not have interviews with the clients of these so-called psychics.
It’s open to debate whether or not psychic abilities exist in human beings. The seven psychics in “Look Into My Eyes” certainly don’t do much to remove skeptical doubt that they have psychic abilities because of all the inaccurate guessing that they have in their psychic readings. The documentary also never questions, investigates, or mentions if the so-called psychics could have researched their clients’ personal lives before the meeting sessions.
The seven psychics who are the focus of the documentary are:
- Per Erik Borja, an aspiring actor who happens to be openly gay.
- Eugene Grygo, an aspiring actor/screenwriter who happens to be openly gay.
- Nikenya Hall, a writer who also claims to be an energy healer.
- Phoebe Hoffman, a high-school dropout and TV-watching enthusiast whose specialty is mind reading of animal pets who are dead or alive.
- Michael Kim, an aspiring actor who says he began having paranormal experiences in the late 2010s.
- Sherrie Lynne, an entertainer who hires herself out for events and dresses in stereotypical psychic clothes when she does readings.
- Ilka Pinheiro, a social justice warrior who brings her progressive views into her psychic readings.
All of the so-called psychics in the documentary were in their 30s, 40s or 50s when this documentary was made, except for Lynne, who appears to be in her 70s. The male psychics are all soft-spoken, while the female psychics all have outspoken personalities. The documentary gives the most screen time to Grygo and the least amount of screen time to Lynne.
Some of the scenes are kind of pathetic, such as Grygo showing he has no singing talent when he warbles off-key during his singing lessons, or when Lynne tries to scrounge up some business by asking random people if they want to hire her to be a psychic at their next party. Most of these psychics live in cramped and cluttered apartments and directly or indirectly admit that the money they make as psychics is to fund their aspirations to become professional entertainers, either in acting and/or screenwriting, because they don’t want to work in regular “9 to 5” jobs.
Out of the seven psychics, Kim (who speaks in a calm, mediatative voice) is the one who gives the most accurate readings, but he also appears to be the most skilled in figuring out the right things to say to his customers at any given moment. He rarely gets flustered when his guesses are wrong. And that could have a lot to do with his background training as an actor.
Viewers of “Look Into My Eyes” will see Hoffman talk about her troubled past in her 20s, when she became a shut-in and addicted to cocaine while living with and doing drugs with her father, who also had cocaine addiction issues. Hoffman, who says she is now clean and sober, claims she’s known about her psychic abilities since she was a teenager. But considering she says she also started abusing drugs when she was a teen, it’s hard to know how much of her “psychic visions” were drug-induced. Hoffman mentions that she’s still struggling with social anxiety and other issues, which is one of the reasons why she says she can’t have a “regular job.”
The sob stories continue. Borja gets teary-eyed when remembering how an ex-boyfriend broke his heart. Grygo breaks down and cries when discussing the ongoing emotional pain of grieving over his brother dying by suicide. The documentary doesn’t have the psychics explain if they feel like they were born psychic or if they suddenly developed psychic skills when they needed a side hustle to supplement their incomes.
Coincidence or not, even though these psychics talk about many things in their personal lives, they don’t talk about their marital status or how being a so-called psychic affects their love lives. The psychics in this documentary all come across as being lonely and unlucky in love. Apparently, their psychic skills don’t extend to being able to find the right romantic partner.
Some of the psychics say that they are more attuned to troubled souls than most people are because of their own personal experiences of feeling like an outsider. Kim says he feels a deep connection to a young female client who was born in China and was adopted by Americans but she wants to know more about her Chinese birth mother, who gave her up for adoption. Kim says that he was also adopted by white parents.
Hall talks about being originally from a conservative, religious community in Oklahoma, where she says she felt like a misfit. Hall says she only felt comfortable where she lived when she moved to New York City. Hall also gives a mini-tour of her apartment in a scene that didn’t need to be in this documentary. Viewers really don’t need to know what kinds of figurines and knickknacks she collects when a more interesting story would be her life experiences that led her to make money by claiming to be a psychic.
“Look Into My Eyes” doesn’t reveal much more background information about the psychics except that Kim used to be an actor student at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York City. At the end of the documentary, he has a session with a woman who was a Strasberg classmate and who wants Kim to contact her deceased male best friend, who was also a Strasberg classmate. Coincidence or not? We might never know, but Strasberg gets plenty of free publicity mentions in this documentary.
As for the psychic readings in “Look Into My Eyes,” most of them are not as convincing as these self-proclaimed psychics would like you to think they are, especially in this day and age when it’s so easy to find out information about people by doing an Internet search. People who are skilled in human psychology can see how the readings mainly consist of picking up on visual clues from the customers, such as body language and physical appearance. The psychics start off with vague statements until the customers reveal more information so the psychics can make better guesses.
Some of the readings are laughably bad because they just involve some common sense and guessing. In one of the readings, Pinheiro states the obvious when she does a reading for a young man with blue-streaked hair who wants to know what the future holds, in terms of his career. Her “psychic” diagnosis is that she tells him that he’s a creative type who doesn’t want to work in an office job. You don’t have to be a psychic to know that people who dye their hair blue are not conventional people and probably don’t want to be hired in an office where employees are expected to wear their hair and clothes in a conservative manner.
Even more cringeworthy is a session where Borja makes all the wrong guesses and asks to start over in the session, but he still makes the wrong guesses. In an interview after this disastrous “psychic reading,” an embarrassed Borja admits that he often doesn’t know what he’s doing in these “psychic readings.” The filmmakers of “Look Into My Eyes” should be given credit for putting this major mess-up in the documentary, but it might leave some skeptic viewers feeling unmoved and wondering why someone with questionable psychic skills is being showcased in this documentary in the first place.
Skeptics will never be able to get this question out of their minds when the psychic statements about deceased loved ones are fairly accurate: Who’s to say that these psychics didn’t look up information and photos about these clients and their deceased loved ones before the readings happened? Most obituaries are available on the Internet. The documentary has no information on whether or not these psychics knew the names of these customers before the sessions, which look like appointments, not walk-in sessions. Because “Look Into My Eyes” refuses to address these information, this omission lowers the quality of the documentary.
The pet psychic sessions have the least credibility. It’s not that difficult to tell someone who lost a pet that the pet is speaking and asking the grieving pet owner to be in a better emotional place. You don’t have to be a psychic to tell someone whose pet has been missing for years that the pet is probably dead. The dubious psychic part comes in when the “psychic” says that the dead pet who went missing is now speaking and wants the pet owner to know that the pet is not suffering anymore. And you just know the pet owner will start to cry.
As a so-called pet psychic, some of Hoffman’s psychic readings sound more like pet training tips that she could’ve gotten from watching pet shows on Animal Planet or any of the National Geographic channels. For example, in one of Hoffman’s sessions, she has a woman customer who is concerned about her Boston Terrier named Dottie, who is unruly and resistant when Dottie has to walk on a leash. (The dog is not there during this “psychic reading” session.) Hoffman’s answers to this client consist of basic dog psychology and training advice—in other words, things that a famous dog trainer such as Cesar Millan could’ve easily said too—and he doesn’t claim to be psychic.
Even though “Look Into My Eyes” has a lot of flaws and omitted information, it’s still a compelling look at people’s willingness to believe that there is life after death and that a connection with deceased loved ones is still possible. Instead of debunking these psychics, this documentary is more interested in showing how people who are troubled in some way will seek out counseling from strangers. Psychics, whether genuine or not, are unofficial therapists and counselors. And if people want to pay others to get this type of therapy in order to feel good, then people should have the freedom to do so, as long as they don’t think they’re getting conned and ripped off in the process.
A24 released “Look Into My Eyes” in select U.S. cinemas on September 6, 2024.