In ‘Look Into My Eyes,’ they see dead people, but that’s not all

“Look Into My Eyes” — 3 stars

“Look Into My Eyes,” an oddly dry and lovely documentary by the director Lana Wilson, opens with a montage of New Yorkers and the questions they’ve come to psychics to answer: Who are my birthparents? What should I do about my finances? Will I ever raise chickens? Their yearnings include the acceptance of an enslaved ancestor and the contentment of a long-lost bearded dragon.

But Wilson (“After Tiller” and the Taylor Swift doc “Miss Americana”) sets the tone with a particularly intriguing seeker. The woman is a 50-year-old emergency room surgeon — i.e., someone skeptics figure would be too scientific for spirits — and she aches to hear from a 10-year-old gunshot victim she couldn’t save. “How is she?” the doctor asks. Patiently and purposefully, we’re led to realize that the act of asking is as important as the answer. The film stirs the soul less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection.

None of the subjects shares their name, not even in the credits (although you can catch one psychic’s information in a shot of her college diploma). Yet, despite — or perhaps because of — the anonymity, the mentalists invite Wilson into their rather ordinary apartments to share the stories that brought them to the job. One explains that poltergeists kept flinging open his doors until he finally Googled “psychic schools, New York City.”

The film is rigorously observational. There’s no spooky cinematography, no woo-woo technics, no pressure to believe in the afterlife. Wilson structures these sessions along our own arc of credulity with stunned tears leading into dubious fumbles, like a client who utterly rejects a prophecy that she’ll fall for a man who wears a fedora. (“That’s not my type at all!” she insists.) The clairvoyant who seems the most mystical, triggering emotional reactions from the words “shrimp,” “April” and “tutu,” also has to take an on-camera break when a reading misses the mark. “Do you ever doubt what you do?” Wilson asks. “Yeah,” he replies. “All the time.”

Documentarians are like mentalists: curious, empathetic and perceptive. Wilson and her editor Hannah Buck lay out their observations of these psychics’ personal lives with pinpoint precision. Nearly all are struggling artists — actors, mostly — who seem a little damaged and lonely. Once we know them, we note that the spirits give the same advice they’d want to hear. Pursue your dreams, trust that you have a purpose. In essence, the clairvoyants serve as blunt therapists, with one channeling a dead grandmother to cast scorn upon her client’s iffy boyfriend.

Here is where viewers will protest that the client had visible doubts about her beau. Isn’t the psychic just saying what she wants to hear? Possibly. But the pleasure of the film is in allowing us to be another specter in these intimate conversations, to sense for ourselves what people need from their encounter.

This mellow character study is never gripping — it has the feel of easing into a bathwater-temperature caldron — but you come away with the desire to strike up a deeper-than-usual chat with a stranger. As one psychic admits, “Even if this is fake, it feels good and I need it.”

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Rated R for strong language. 108 minutes.