Lana Wilson has won an Emmy and a sterling reputation as a documentarian of serious subjects that range from abortion doctors to the sexualization of children via a look at Brooke Shields’s life and career.

In Friday’s “Look into My Eyes,” Wilson presents a coolly provocative, emotionally transfixing study about people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead.

It was 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s win, that Wilson first encountered a psychic.

“In a strip mall I just saw the sign, ‘$5 Psychic Readings.’ Without even thinking, having never been to a psychic before, I just walked in,” Wilson, 41, recalled in a Zoom interview. “I pulled back this curtain. There’s a table, two chairs, and no one was there. I sat down and immediately felt incredibly emotional.

“Just sitting in this chair in this quiet room was giving me this chance to see my own desperate, confused internal state. I was, ‘Why am I so emotional? No one’s even here.’

“Tearing up told me there’s something just about the situation itself. Then the psychic talked to me for about five minutes. It was comforting.

“As I was leaving, she said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ At that time, I was finishing this film called ‘The Departure’ about a priest who counsels suicidal people but absorbs all of the pain of the people he’s counseling. So he really struggles.

“And the psyche said, ‘That sounds like my life.’ I was so surprised! I’d seen psychic readings as this trivial, silly activity and when she said that — and she wanted to tell me about how people come to her at these major crossroads in their lives — that’s when I thought, Wow! Couldn’t this be an incredible setting for a film where we get to be a fly on the wall in these sessions?”

With her team, they canvassed all over New York City, seeing 100 psychics, narrowing them down to the seven in her film.

“I was looking, first, for people who were sincere. I understand a lot of people hate psychics, because some, especially some storefront psychics, are making huge amounts of money exploiting vulnerable people. I think they don’t really believe in what they’re doing.

“I wanted to find people who deeply believed in what they were doing. You can agree or disagree if what they’re doing is ‘real’ or not. But they’re totally sincere.

“What I want people to take away is that this is a cinematic and emotional exploration of how human beings try to connect with each other. Witness each other. Heal each other.

“And how we’re all flawed human beings, trying to do that in the best way that we know how.”

“Look Into My Eyes” is in theaters Friday