4 hours ago
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For anyone remotely near the worlds of documentary, comedy or medical fraud, there has been one thing on the mind for weeks now: a single-minute clip of Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian whose boundary-pushing HBO series The Rehearsal cemented his status as docu-reality’s premier auteur, staring into the deep blue eyes of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing startup Theranos. Unblinking, faces inches apart, the famously dry purveyor of harebrained business schemes and the convicted fraudster appeared locked in a battle of wills. “Are you being real right now?” Fielder asked her, in a classically meta bit – could Fielder really have spent years filming a secret documentary with one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious pariahs?
The prospect of TV’s grand illusionist versus emblematic girl-boss scammer seemed potentially too good to be true; buzz for You Can See Everything, Fielder’s furtive documentary co-directed with wunderkind du jour Lance Oppenheim (whose narrative feature debut, the Robert Pattinson-starring Primetime, premiered last month) was such that access to the film’s New York film festival premiere on Wednesday became this fall’s hottest ticket.
Those who were there can confirm: the hype is deserved. You Can See Everything is, somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed – a stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject. You know from the minute Billy Evans, Holmes’s shifty husband-cum-business partner who entered the picture post-Theranos, claims that “the best way for people to see who she is … is to give as much access as possible into our daily lives”, while lying with Holmes on a playroom floor, that you’re in for a wild ride. My mouth was agape for, conservatively, one half of the film’s unusually deserved three-hour run time.
Let me say now, if you’ve made it this far: I will not spoil major shifts – and if you are at all familiar with the Fielder canon, you know they’re coming – for a singular movie whose enjoyment depends, in part, on an element of surprise, both for viewers and for film-makers who genuinely seem to not know what they signed up for when they walked into the Holmes-Evans household rental in 2023. Arguably the less you know about anything that is to come, the better.
What I can tell you is that You Can See Everything is a masterpiece of who’s playing who, the fragility and absurdities of trust, seemingly beget by chance. Back in 2023, convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy and awaiting the start of her 11-year sentence in prison, Holmes, along with Evans – who appears to be her match made in heaven, as neither ever blink and are maybe always lying – sought out a film crew to document their life with their two young children, in an attempt to protest her innocence and, perhaps, rebrand for Theranos 2.0. For some reason, they chose Oppenheim, a documentarian whose distinctive style – hyper-saturation, tight frames, creeping zooms – exposes the eerie in the mundane, and Fielder, whose precise style of spectrum-y, extreme cringe means that no question will be off the table. As Fielder points out on camera, in one of several exquisitely blunt confrontations, it is an odd choice to allow a comedian famous for his business scams to make a documentary that will supposedly clear your name of arguably the most famous fraud scandal of the 2010s.
The result is a three-hour documentary filmed like a thriller and scored like a drama that plays like an unraveling of certainty in real time. Oppenheim’s house style, shots tightly hugging then boring into a face with laser-like curiosity, perfectly suits the material; scenes that could be an unlikely tableau instead become a fascinating parade of inscrutable motivations, isolated actors bristling against the others. There is something extremely satisfying in watching Fielder’s sharp angles – arched eyebrows, needling questions, dispensation of social buffers – tangle with Holmes’s disposition (or performance? or genuine personality?) of guileless warmth, a strange and compelling chemistry building within a reality distortion field. If Fielder’s earlier work felt at times like it was punching down, trading on the naivety of regular people, well, he has finally met his match.
I am, admittedly, writing around a film that must be seen to be discussed, and will surely engender much chatter as to what, exactly, we just witnessed. But trust that things devolve in a very Fielderian spiral, into a dissection of the form unlike anything I have ever seen or, as things get going and participants’ either lose their filters or sharpen their game, anything I have ever hoped to see when it comes to the figure known as Elizabeth Holmes. Trust, too, that if there was a question you were hoping to ask Holmes or, moreover, her husband – did he really have no reservations when he met the disgraced founder at a party in 2017, at the height of her scandal? – it gets asked, and then some (I did not need to know about conjugal visits, or lack thereof, in the Texas prison where Holmes continues to reside).
Trust, ultimately, that you can see more than you ever imagined you’d see about Elizabeth Holmes and maybe get no closer to discerning the truth – and yet it will all be worth it.
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You Can See Everything screened at the New York film festival and will be released in the US on 16 October with UK and Australian release dates to be announced
English (US) ·