A few paragraphs down, you’ll find my list of The Best Movies of 2024. I won’t feel bad if you don’t get that far. Some critics spend all year thinking about their Top 10, arranging and rearranging it until it feels like a perfect reflection of their taste, and, more importantly, their personality. But by the time those lists start to appear at the beginning of December, printed in major publications or recorded as ballots or simply posted on Letterboxd, it can be hard to tell one arbitrarily delimited collection of titles from another, especially as the trickle turns into a flood. The internet has proven that none of us are as distinctive as we might have thought in a pre-online world, which can be a source of comfort when seeking out likeminded souls but tends to quash the notion that any critic’s taste is all that singular. Nickel Boys may be a radically challenging work whose aesthetic experimentation has polarized general audiences, but it’s also, at least according to one account, the movie that’s topped more critics’ lists than any other. So much for standing out from the crowd.
It so happens that I, too, think Nickel Boys is the movie of the year, and I’m happy to lend my voice to the chorus, especially since it’s exactly the kind of movie that critics should be advocating for. But was it slightly more exciting last year, when the movie I found atop my list, Ira Sachs’ sexy, messy Passages, was one virtually no other critic rated so highly? I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I don’t put movies on my list for the sake of novelty, but there’s a special charge when I survey the field and realize I’m an outlier, the sole champion (or at least one of only a few) of a movie that eminently deserves it. When I scan others’ lists, I’m drawn to the odd films out, the ones that a critic sees something in that no one else does. I’m not always convinced—there’s usually a reason they’re out there all by their lonesome—but it’s the rare opportunity to think about movies in a different way, one I wouldn’t have if I only paid attention to those whose tastes cluster around mine. A list tells me what you like. An outlier tells me who you are.
The more lists there are, of course, the fewer true outliers remain. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody is, so far as I know, the only critic to so highly esteem the indie comedy Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which took the second slot on his list (right below Nickel Boys, naturally). But that could change by the time I finish writing this sentence. (The only way to ensure a true unicorn is to rupture the boundaries of the exercise altogether, as Village Voice critic J.
Hoberman did when he put Game 6 of the World Series on his 1986 list.) Looking at my own list, though, I’m surprised at the movie that stands out, especially because it isn’t, to my mind, an especially difficult or controversial one.
This is my list (in order):
2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
3. Hard Truths
5. Look Into My Eyes
6. Good One
7. Anora
And the outlier is Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Wilson’s documentary about small-time psychics and their clients premiered at Sundance and got largely favorable reviews when it was released by A24 in September. (It will be available to stream on Max beginning Jan. 10.) But in a challenging box-office climate, especially for documentaries, it seemed to vanish quickly, and the lift that might have come from year-end lists or critics’ awards never materialized. It didn’t feel like I was alone when I talked to people about how great it was, how the movie brought keen insight and compassion to a subject usually dismissed with a quick wave of the hand. But the more it went unmentioned and unawarded, passed over for documentaries with more famous or politically urgent subjects, the stranger its omission struck me as being.
It’s a dangerous thing to weave conspiracy theories about other people’s taste. It’s too easy to straw-man, to invent rationales for the express purpose of getting mad at them. But as I read over the reviews of Look Into My Eyes, the negative and even some of the positive ones, I found a recurring sentiment that I didn’t expect, the idea that the movie should have weighed in more forcefully on the validity of psychic readings. One critique faulted the psychics’ “lack of integrity,” while another simply called them “predatory frauds,” and even more sympathetic critics noted that the movie is “uninterested in proving anything definitively,” as if settling once and for all the existence of the spirit realm was ever on the table. When I told a friend how much I liked the movie, he responded, in essence, the one about the scammers?
Until I started running into these reactions, it had never occurred to me that the question of whether psychics were legitimately in communication with the spirits of the dead was an open one, certainly not to the extent that one of a documentary’s chief duties would be to answer it. The goal of Look Into My Eyes isn’t to adjudicate the legitimacy of its subjects’ beliefs, any more than the goal of Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s documentary about obsessive fans of The Shining, is to vet the theory that the movie is Stanley Kubrick’s way of confessing that he faked the moon landing. It’s to explore the nature of those beliefs: why people hold them, and what needs they fulfill. Although Wilson doesn’t deploy the epistemological theatrics of Errol Morris’ movies, she’s in line with what he once described to me as the subject that underlies all his work: Why do people believe wrong things?
Wilson and her cinematographer, Stephen Maing (also a co-director of the great documentary Union), don’t shoot the psychic readings as conversations but as opposing monologues, with one person neatly framed and the other’s voice audible from out of frame. In a fascinating session at the True/False Film Festival in March, Wilson showed outtakes from early versions of the film that she decided to scrap because it felt like the camera was in the wrong place. She likewise decided to stay away from storefront practitioners, who might have seemed more obviously disreputable, in favor of psychics who work out of their own apartments, where the modest setting underlines that if this is a scam, it is not one these people are getting rich from.
Whether or not you believe these psychics are communing with the dead—or, in one case, with the spirits of still-living animals—the interactions with their clients feel genuinely emotional in a way that is hard to dismiss entirely. Wilson opens the film, smartly, with a professional woman, a surgeon in her 50s, who says she’s been haunted for 20 years by the memory of a pediatric gunshot victim who died in her arms. In the emergency room, she recalls, people went back to work without saying a word, and after sobbingly briefly in the ambulance bay, she did too. Talking about trauma, she says, “is something that in medicine that we just don’t do well, or at all.” She says she’s come to the psychic to find out if the spirit of that young girl is at peace, but she also clearly just wants a place to talk about it. She doesn’t seem like a person who would rule out conventional therapy, but maybe she’s looking for a sense of finality that process couldn’t provide, even if she knows on some level that it’s a fiction.
Not even the psychics in Look Into My Eyes pretend their powers are beyond doubt. “I never fully 100 percent believe in the things I say,” one admits, while another describes coming to the process after a period of emotional turmoil and deciding, “Even if this is fake, I like it. It feels good, and I need it.” You can assume their clients are all credulous dolts being taken for a ride by slick pretenders—especially since, in probing the psychics’ backgrounds, Wilson uncovers that many of them started out as struggling actors. But the movie at least allows for the possibility that they’ve come to the same conclusion as that psychic: This feels good, and I need it.
Maybe the point isn’t to discover what’s true so much as to test the boundaries of what we can accept. Does it sound absurd when the spirit of a beloved friend or relative tells us we’re on the right path, or can we convince ourselves to buy it as long as the words are coming out of someone else’s mouth? As one psychic puts it, “If it resonates with the person I’m talking to, then it doesn’t fucking matter.”
You can certainly take that as a con artist’s rationalization. We all hold to ideas that don’t stand up to strict scrutiny, hoping that we’re deluding ourselves just enough to survive in the world without divorcing ourselves from it. When we watch Look Into My Eyes, its subjects are looking at us, too, asking what fictions we use to keep ourselves sane, and whether we’d really live better lives without them.
This post was originally published on here
