Nathan Fielder has built a career on making people uncomfortable. On “Nathan for You,” the Jewish comedian presented business owners with increasingly absurd ideas, maintaining a straight face as his supposed efforts to help spiraled into elaborate social experiments.
Elizabeth Holmes built a company on a promise that sounded almost as improbable. The Stanford dropout claimed Theranos could revolutionize medicine by performing a wide range of blood tests using only a tiny sample collected from a finger prick. The technology would make testing easier, help detect diseases earlier, and potentially save lives.
The difference was that Holmes was asking people to trust her with their money and their health.
Theranos’ technology could not deliver what she promised. In 2022, Holmes was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors. She was sentenced to 11 years and three months in federal prison.
In “You Can See Everything,” directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, these two practitioners of elaborate persuasion become an unlikely onscreen pair. Holmes and her partner, William “Billy” Evans, invite the filmmakers into their home just 34 days before she begins her prison sentence. What follows is a deeply uncomfortable examination of deception, devotion, and the stories people tell to make their lives bearable.
It is also frequently hilarious. At my screening, the audience alternated between laughter and the kind of cringing that makes you want to look away.
For all its unsettling turns, “You Can See Everything” is a remarkable achievement — my second-favorite film of the year, after “Obsession.”
Who is fooling whom?
Fielder’s appeal has always rested on uncertainty. How much of his awkwardness is a performance? When he expresses concern for someone, is he being sincere, setting up a joke, or doing both?
Those questions become especially compelling when his subject is Holmes, whose public persona helped sell a company built on misleading claims.
Fielder gives her a card shortly before she goes to prison. He spends time with her family, asks uncomfortable questions, and occasionally seems moved by what he sees. But viewers familiar with his work may find themselves scrutinizing his apparent kindness as closely as Holmes’ explanations.
Holmes and Evans, meanwhile, appear to believe that giving Fielder access will help their cause. Evans says they chose him because he thinks outside the box, then presses him to come up with ideas that might exonerate her.
The arrangement leaves a question hanging over nearly every scene. Does the couple understand the filmmaker they have invited into their home? And does Fielder fully understand the people who have invited him?
A familiar story becomes strangely intimate
Holmes’ rise and fall have already inspired extensive coverage, including John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood” and “The Dropout,” the Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried.
Fielder and Oppenheim find fresh material in the distance between Holmes’ public record and her private explanations.
At one point, Fielder plays a recording of Holmes discussing Theranos’ capabilities with Fortune journalist Roger Parloff. Her response is that she was describing what the technology would be able to do in the future. It is an explanation that exposes the gulf between how she presents her intentions and how others understood her promises.
That distinction runs through the film. Holmes seems determined to discuss the person she believes herself to be, while Fielder keeps returning to what she actually said and did.
One of his most effective decisions is to have Holmes watch Seyfried’s portrayal of her in “The Dropout.” Sitting beside Fielder on a bed, she becomes so upset that she wants it turned off. Watching someone who has worked so hard to shape her own image confront another person’s interpretation of it is more revealing than another recap of the scandal.
The unsettling presence of Billy Evans
Evans emerges as one of the film’s most confounding figures.
His devotion to Holmes might initially seem straightforward: He loves her, believes in her, and wants to keep their family together. But his behavior repeatedly complicates that picture.
A seemingly minor disagreement over how Holmes mixes eggs becomes uncomfortable to watch. So do scenes involving his management of her social media account and his confrontational responses to critics.
Rather than resolve what these moments mean, the film allows them to accumulate. Is Evans protecting Holmes, controlling her, or treating those impulses as interchangeable?
Fielder asks him why he would want to build a life with someone publicly known for fraud. His answer does little to settle the question.
Then there is Evans’ statement that he carries a gun at all times. Paired with the film’s ominous music, it lends an additional edge to scenes that might otherwise look like ordinary domestic exchanges.
Not every intimate moment earns its place. An extended shot of Evans brushing his teeth in the shower feels unnecessary. By then, the film has already given us plenty to consider about his comfort with the camera.
How so many people came to believe
The documentary’s domestic focus does not erase the larger question of how Holmes persuaded so many influential people to trust her.
Theranos benefited from a prestigious board, powerful supporters, and the appeal of a medical breakthrough that seemed almost too good to question. Its association with Walgreens gave the company a familiar retail presence, even as its technology fell short of its claims.
The promise was seductive. Who would not want blood testing to become easier, cheaper, and less painful? Once prominent people endorsed the company, their confidence became another reason for others to believe.
Former Theranos employees Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung helped expose the company’s problems, while Carreyrou’s reporting for The Wall Street Journal challenged the story Holmes had sold.
Fielder approaches the aftermath from a different direction. He is interested in what happens when someone whose story has collapsed continues to insist that she has been misunderstood.
The film is most disturbing when it suggests that exposure and accountability do not necessarily produce self-reflection.
Nathan Fielder’s questions cut through the performance
Fielder’s questioning is patient, literal, and often devastating. There is something almost Talmudic about his insistence on following an explanation to its logical conclusion, then returning to whatever contradiction remains.
At other times, his attention to social peculiarities feels closer to “Seinfeld.” In one especially bewildering scene, he plays Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine for Holmes, who says she does not understand the joke.
The moment is funny, but it also captures the difficulty of reading her. Viewers are left trying to interpret an exchange that becomes stranger the longer it continues.
Fielder’s restrained reactions help sustain that uncertainty. When Holmes says she has never lied about anything, his incredulity briefly breaks through. After so much evasion and qualification, the reaction is almost a relief.
Oppenheim and Fielder reinforce the tension visually. Tight close-ups can make the space between interviewer and subject feel uncomfortably small, while the score gives ordinary encounters the atmosphere of a psychological thriller.
The film’s power comes partly from that collision. The setting may be a family home, but the experience can feel closer to a horror movie.
Sympathy without absolution
Holmes cries at several points, but I found it difficult to feel sympathy for her. My concern was for her young children, who must live with the consequences of decisions they had no part in making.
Still, the documentary raises a worthwhile question about what audiences expect from a disgraced public figure. Does a tender interaction with a child reveal something meaningful? Certainly. Does it answer questions about fraud or responsibility? Hardly.
Fielder seems alert to the temptation to treat domestic intimacy as evidence of innocence. The camera can show Holmes as a mother and partner without resolving what she understands about the harm associated with Theranos.
His own feelings are harder to pin down. When he says he believes Holmes and Evans love each other, is he offering a sincere conclusion, reassuring his subjects, or testing another idea?
That ambiguity keeps the film alive long after a more conventional documentary might have settled into a verdict.
A brilliant film that could be tighter
At nearly three hours, “You Can See Everything” would benefit from a firmer edit. Some exchanges repeat ideas the film has already established, and cutting roughly half an hour could have made its strongest moments land harder.
Yet Fielder and Oppenheim find inventive ways to continue the story after Holmes enters prison. Without spoiling the film’s biggest surprises, its later turns push the relationship between documentary and performance into increasingly strange territory.
I wanted more direct questioning about responsibility, particularly when Holmes’ explanations become circular. The film is so skilled at exposing the mechanics of evasion that it sometimes seems content to remain inside them.
But that frustration is also part of the experience. Fielder can ask precise questions, replay recordings, and place contradictions in front of his subjects. He cannot make them provide satisfying answers.
The title comes from a text Holmes sends Fielder, promising a degree of access that the film gradually reveals to be impossible. You can live in someone’s home, watch them raise their children, and record their explanations. You can see an extraordinary amount and still struggle to understand what you are looking at.
“You Can See Everything” turns that uncertainty into one of the year’s most absorbing films. Its most unsettling question is how much we are willing to overlook when someone tells us a story we want to believe.
