Of the many long conversations in You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, one has really stuck with me.
Holmes has brought out one of the dismantled devices her company, Theranos, falsely claimed could do diagnostic analyses on a single drop of blood. One of the film’s directors, Nathan Fielder, asks her if the device ever did what it advertised. Well, Holmes says, it could. Fielder digs in his heels. Yes, but did it? Holmes responds that it could do all kinds of things. In fact, it still can.
Those words — “could” and “can” — are loaded, and the whole movie feels like an exercise in deceptive semantics. It’s right there in the title: You can see everything, but will you? This is a three-hour movie, and yet you’ll leave the theater knowing less about its subject than you did going in. That’s its tricky power, and its entire point. It’s slippery, unsettling, maddening, transfixing and sometimes very funny, and it will have you second-guessing your own reactions as you have them.
The first half of You Can See Everything was shot over the course of a month in 2023, right before Holmes was set to serve an 11-year prison sentence for fraud. Fielder, his co-director Lance Oppenheim and a small crew were crammed into a rented beach house in Del Mar with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and their two young children. Fielder is frequently on-screen with them: quietly observing their routines, occasionally interrupting to ask them why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Then there are those conversations, which are as fascinating for what isn’t said as what is. Holmes claims she did nothing wrong. She never meant to deceive anyone. She’s actually never told a lie. At least, not that she recalls. As Fielder interrogates her and Evans — why are they talking around everything, and why do they even want a film crew in their business? — they stare back at him with big, unblinking eyes. There’s no funny business here. They have nothing to hide.
If you’re at all familiar with Fielder’s work, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it does, about 90 minutes in, when Holmes goes off to prison. The second half of You Can See Everything becomes more about Billy Evans, his control over Holmes’s public image, and about Fielder scrutinizing his own role in all of this. Fielder’s series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal merged cringe comedy, audience manipulation and metafiction, and he and Oppenheim are doing the same thing here by documenting their own movie’s deconstruction.
There are individual moments in You Can See Everything — a glance, a pause, a word choice — that inspire more complicated feelings than any number of feature-length films. Watching it is like having a sleight-of-hand magician walk you step by step through his trick and still not totally understanding how he did it. The movie reveals itself to you as it goes, and it keeps on revealing long after it’s over. But then, what does it reveal, if anything? The longer you stare at it, the less you know for sure.