Nathan Fielder’s movie on Elizabeth Holmes absolutely lives up to the hype

Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Turns a Familiar Scandal Into a Puzzle About Truth

Earthguardiansonline.com – Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything” arrives with an unusual advantage for a documentary: access to Elizabeth Holmes at one of the most consequential moments of her life. The former Theranos founder, convicted of fraud for misleading investors about her blood-testing company, is filmed shortly before beginning her federal prison sentence in 2023. The result is a film that does not simply revisit a widely known Silicon Valley collapse. It examines the person at its center with an unsettling degree of intimacy.

The movie opens in US theaters Friday after an intense buildup following a surprise trailer released last month. Early viewers have responded with extraordinary enthusiasm, with some calling it the year’s best film and others raising the possibility of a best-picture Oscar nomination for a documentary. That anticipation is understandable: Fielder and Oppenheim have made a project that appears determined to challenge the usual rules of biography, true-crime storytelling and documentary distance.

Its most startling material comes from Holmes’ preparations for incarceration. Before reporting to prison, she sits for more than 200 cameras so her appearance can be captured and digitally reproduced. Those scans could be used for video, holographic material or artificial-intelligence versions of Holmes while she is away.

The process is not presented merely as a technical experiment. Holmes and her partner, William “Billy” Evans, are developing a healthcare venture they describe as “Theranos 2.0.” A programmable digital likeness could potentially allow Holmes to make presentations or pitches even while she is incarcerated. Yet the scene also reveals a contradiction at the heart of the film. Holmes becomes emotional as she considers allowing her image to circulate again.

I have a weird history with being on camera.

That statement carries obvious weight for someone whose public image has been analyzed for years. Holmes was sentenced in 2022 to more than 11 years in prison after her conviction for defrauding investors. She has been approved to transfer to a halfway house in 2027. “You Can See Everything” does not treat those facts as a final explanation of who she is. Instead, it keeps returning to the uncertainty surrounding her actions, her self-presentation and her ability to believe her own version of events.

An Unusually Matched Filmmaker and Subject

Fielder is an especially intriguing director for this material. In “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” he has built a singular screen persona around elaborate planning, social discomfort, staged situations and unstable lines between performance and reality. He can appear detached and analytical, but his projects frequently expose how easily people participate in narratives that do not fully make sense.

Holmes becomes an almost inexhaustible subject for that approach. The film suggests that she is not simply one fixed person waiting to be decoded. She offers conflicting possibilities: perhaps she is socially unusual, as Evans argues; perhaps she has been shaped by damaging men in her life, as her father appears to feel; perhaps she struggles to grasp how her speech sounds to others. One revealing sequence centers on Holmes’ response to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First” routine and raises questions about how she processes language and social expectations.

Another, darker possibility persists throughout: that Holmes is a habitual liar whose self-deception has become inseparable from the stories she tells other people. Fielder explicitly considers whether she could be among the most manipulative people alive. The comparison he makes is to a magician, an artist of persuasion whose work depends on directing the audience’s attention while keeping the mechanism hidden.

The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true. So what is the reality?

Holmes’ question becomes the documentary’s central challenge. The film does not offer an easy answer, and that restraint is part of its force. A conventional account might sort its subject into a clear category: victim, villain, visionary, delusional founder or strategic con artist. Fielder and Oppenheim instead create a work in which those interpretations collide, overlap and remain unresolved.

Closeness Without Comfort

The filmmakers’ access is notably personal. Evans, with whom Holmes shares two children, is present throughout the story, and the film includes moments so private that they push against ordinary documentary boundaries. At one point, Evans is shown showering nude. The inclusion underlines how deeply the directors have entered Holmes’ domestic world, but it also raises a question the film seems eager to keep alive: does unprecedented access necessarily bring audiences closer to the truth?

Visually, “You Can See Everything” is both carefully composed and intentionally unflattering. Fielder and Holmes are frequently photographed in severe close-up, bringing sweat, blemishes and wrinkles into sharp view. Rather than producing glamour, the imagery can make its subjects feel as if they are being inspected under laboratory glass. The approach echoes the Theranos story itself: a promise of revelation placed under scrutiny, with every apparent answer producing more uncertainty.

The production also refuses to hide its own machinery. Crew members and boom microphones appear on screen, emphasizing that the film is constructed even when it is documenting real events. That choice fits Fielder’s long-standing interest in artificiality. “You Can See Everything” constantly moves between observation and recreation, reality and performance, facts and the stories people use to organize them.

For viewers who know Holmes primarily through court proceedings, headlines and the spectacular failure of Theranos, this documentary offers a different kind of encounter. It does not erase the consequences of the company’s deception or dispute Holmes’ conviction. Rather, it asks what remains unknowable even after legal judgments have been made and public narratives have solidified.

That makes the film’s title feel less like a promise than an irony. Cameras can record a face from hundreds of angles. Technology can preserve a person’s image for future use. A documentary can obtain remarkable proximity to its subject. None of that guarantees a complete understanding of who is being watched. In “You Can See Everything,” the closer the audience gets to Elizabeth Holmes, the more elusive she becomes.