‘YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING’ Is a Nathan Fielder Hall-of-Mirrors Masterpiece

You can see everything. And then you can’t.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything is a movie about the unknowable nature of truth. About the distance between what someone says, what they believe they’re saying, what actually happened, and what an observer can ever reasonably conclude from any of it. It’s also one of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen, a 174-minute hall of mirrors that turns Elizabeth Holmes, documentary filmmaking, performance, recreation, and the legendary absurdist comedian/satirist/experimental documentarian Nathan Fielder himself into objects of intense scrutiny.

Oppenheim and Fielder’s direction is precise and intentionally invasive. Shot in a boxy frame, the camera gets so close to its subjects that you can make out open pores, cracked lips, and the smallest shifts in expression. Faces bloom into entire landscapes. The effect is claustrophobic and voyeuristic, trapping us inside the reality Holmes and the people around her are attempting to weave while asking us to study every twitch for evidence of sincerity or deceit. For You Can See Everything’s runtime, we are willing victims to its exacting brand of Stockholm Syndrome.

Ostensibly this is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Thirty-four days before she reports to federal prison, the disgraced Theranos founder gives Fielder and Oppenheim extraordinary access to her home, her family, and the final weeks of her freedom. Theranos, the blood-testing startup once valued in the billions, rose to prominence on Holmes’ promise that its machines could perform a battery of medical tests from a drop of blood. The technology never lived up to those claims even as it was rolled out commercially, and Holmes was convicted on charges related to investor fraud and sentenced to more than 11 years in jail.

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Fielder enters this world and immediately finds himself puzzling out whether the access itself is yet another ruse. Is he little more than the most recent victim of Holmes’ deceit? A ploy to rebrand and potentially win early release and reframe public perception? To this day, Holmes insists she did nothing wrong. More extraordinarily, she claims she has never lied in her adult life, that she is an incredibly open and honest person, and that allowing the cameras inside every nook and cranny of her personal life will prove it. Fielder recognizes the contradiction almost immediately. The person most famous for misleading investors, patients, journalists, and much of Silicon Valley is asking him to trust that she is uniquely incapable of dishonesty.

Early on, Holmes reveals that one of her greatest fears has always been letting people see her cry. She then proceeds to cry in scene after scene. Are these crocodile tears? Is she being genuine? Is the fact that we immediately ask that question proof of her manipulative powers, or evidence that her reputation has made sincere expression impossible? Fielder knowingly warns her that no matter what she says, people will approach her with skepticism. She may never be believed again.

 That prediction is borne out by the experience of watching the movie. Whatever Holmes does, there is this pall of potential insincerity hanging over her. The big, bulging eyes. The little tears running down her face. Her insistence that love matters more to her than money, that her family is the most important thing in her life, that she still believes in the medical technology she tried to build. Every declaration arrives contaminated by what we already know about the person making it. Or what we think we know and are looking to see proved out. 

That uncertainty is where You Can See Everything becomes the culmination of Fielder’s entire body of work. He has long incorporated surrealism, recreation, deception, and himself into projects that interrogate whether sufficient attention to detail can ever bring us closer to objective truth. The Rehearsal takes that impulse to its logical extreme: recreate the room down to the furniture, reenact what was said at the exact time and tempo, run the moment over and over with slight variations, and perhaps somewhere inside all those simulations you can discover what someone truly felt, what they meant, or what the “right” thing to do might have been. You Can See Everything drops that same obsession into a situation where the truth has already been litigated, dramatized, mythologized, and sold back to us several times over.

The documentary, never less than arresting across its 174 minutes, is effectively bifurcated. Its first half unfolds before Holmes’ incarceration, when she is so available that she invites Fielder to move into the guest house to be around 24/7. The latter half begins after she reports to federal prison, where she can no longer be recorded in any way, shape, or form. Not over the phone. Not during an in-person visit. Naturally, Fielder being Fielder, he starts inventing increasingly elaborate ways around that limitation, even if it means constructing a reality-distortion field just to complete the mission of the documentary.

The movie’s engagement with Hulu’s The Dropout is one of its most mind-boggling, Fielder Method-esque expressions of that idea. Throughout the doc, Holmes watches Amanda Seyfried playing Elizabeth Holmes. Later, Seyfried watches footage of Holmes watching Seyfried playing Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes watches a fictional Elizabeth Holmes; the actress playing Elizabeth Holmes studies the real Elizabeth Holmes studying her; Fielder then reconstructs portions of that interaction to better understand what everyone involved was actually feeling. It’s the kind of fourth-wall-shattering rabbit hole only Nathan Fielder would think to construct. Reality keeps breaking into smaller pieces and refracted back until truth itself seems impossibly slippery. 

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And yet this is not some new direction for him. Nathan for You was ostensibly a show about helping struggling businesses, but many of its “scams” were acts of borderline genius marketing. Dumb Starbucks became a genuine cultural phenomenon by exploiting parody and fair-use arguments to build a fake Starbucks that people lined up around the block to visit. He would conjure up viral moments out of carefully planned deceptions. There has always been a question inside Fielder’s comedy about where deception ends and invention begins, and how much intent matters if the resulting thing actually works. Here, we’re left wondering that exact thing: who is the true master manipulator at play? 

The clearest precursor to this work though may be Finding Frances, the feature-length Nathan for You finale in which Fielder attempts to help an elderly man locate the woman he believes was the love of his life. What begins as a romantic quest becomes increasingly uncomfortable as the purity of that stated intention breaks down. Meanwhile Fielder himself begins a strange relationship with an escort, ostensibly as part of the project, only for the distinction between performance and actual affection to become harder to locate. Fielder has always been willing to fall into the traps he constructs for other people and let his alien persona try to puzzle out the humanity beneath it. He makes himself part of the experiment, then refuses to tell us what conclusion to draw from the results. This is never more true than here. 

Holmes proves an almost impossibly perfect subject for that approach because the movie never arrives at some clean revelation that unlocks her. Nothing is spoon-fed. Nothing is dictated. We are asked to look longer and closer, and the longer we look, the less certain the image becomes. Obscurity becomes obsessively difficult to overcome. 

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Holmes’ partner Billy Evans further complicates the picture. At first positioned as Holmes’ supportive partner and the father of her children, he gradually emerges as the film’s real antagonist, a controlling and frequently repulsive presence who seems entirely unaware of how much he is telling on himself. The effect recalls The Jinx, those rare documentary moments when someone forgets the camera is recording and reveals something more damning than any accusation could. He manages the terms of Holmes’ participation, polices how she is being seen, and keeps positioning himself between her and the filmmakers in ways that make you wonder who exactly agreed to this documentary. And why. 

And yet he is not a villain you can dispose of so cleanly. His devotion to Holmes appears to be the one thing about him that isn’t a performance. He moves across the country to be near her in federal lockup. He raises their children. He keeps showing up for a woman the entire world has written off, and whatever else is true about him, that part reads as real. Fielder and Oppenheim are not interested in resolving the contradiction for us. They just keep the camera on him until both things are undeniable at once.

One of the film’s quieter but potentially crucial moments comes when Fielder speaks with Holmes’ father about when he believes his daughter changed. His answer isn’t Theranos, Sunny Balwani, or the pressure of Silicon Valley. He points instead to the sexual assault Holmes experienced when she was younger. The documentary doesn’t turn that into a tidy psychological explanation, nor should it, but it hangs there like a possible Rosetta Stone for another thread running through the film: how much control Holmes has actually exercised over her own life, and how much has been exerted upon her by the men surrounding her. It doesn’t absolve her of anything. It makes the picture and Holmes herself harder to flatten into the caricature it would be easier for us to understand. 

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That introduces yet another impossible question. Are Holmes and Evans two narcissists scheming together, continually attempting to get one more act of duplicity over on the world? And if so, why? Or is Holmes herself trapped inside a controlling relationship, another example of her being susceptible to male manipulation despite having once run a multibillion-dollar company? Does that change how we understand her relationship with Balwani? Does intelligence in one arena tell us anything whatsoever about a person’s vulnerability in another? Every apparent answer produces another question.

And that’s the brilliance of You Can See Everything. The title initially sounds like a promise. With enough cameras, enough access, enough close-ups, enough recreation, enough time, perhaps everything can finally become visible. Fielder and Oppenheim spend nearly three hours proving the opposite. You can watch Elizabeth Holmes cry up close and personal. You can reconstruct her words with an Emmy-winning actress. You can replay a conversation, study every facial expression, interrogate every contradiction, and turn the whole thing around to examine the filmmaker doing the interrogating. You can see everything.

And then you can’t.

CONCLUSION: Fielder and Oppenheim spend 174 minutes pointing every available instrument at Elizabeth Holmes, then at the people around her, then at the documentary itself, and arrive at less certainty than they started with. That’s the point. ‘You Can See Everything’ is a brilliant culmination of everything Nathan Fielder has been building toward since ‘Nathan for You’, and one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

A+