This article contains spoilers for You Can See Everything.
Since its top-secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival in September, my single greatest desire in life has been to see everything — as in, You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary following the final month of Elizabeth Holmes’s life before she entered federal prison. It’s rare to see documentaries screen with a spoiler warning, but every early review of You Can See Everything emphasized going in completely blind.
I went in knowing little besides the basic details of the Holmes scandal. At just 19 years old, Holmes founded Theranos, a health tech company in Silicon Valley that claimed to perform hundreds of medical tests using a single fingerprick of blood. Twelve years later, a 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé by John Carreyrou would reveal that the technology didn’t work as promised and that Theranos had been relying on traditional laboratory equipment. Holmes and her business partner and boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, were both convicted of wire fraud.
That leads us to You Can See Everything. Holmes’s prison sentence began in May 2023, and the first hour of the documentary centers around her final 30 days. Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans, allowed Fielder and his crew to essentially live in their Del Mar home.
There’s some fascinating material in the first hour of the film, but certainly no bombshell revelations early reviews had promised. Then Holmes enters prison, and the documentary takes off.
Two years after Holmes goes to prison, Fielder and Oppenheim turn the cameras back on. Evans is living in Texas to be nearer to Holmes with their two children, and he and Holmes are working together to build “Theranos 2.0,” this time centered around using lasers to test bodily fluid samples for disease. Tensions grow between Fielder and Evans, who becomes increasingly controlling towards Holmes. Fielder then brings in actress Amanda Seyfried (who portrayed Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout) to participate in reenactments of conversations with Holmes that could not be filmed.
Most viewers understand that Holmes is a liar. She repeatedly claims in the film that Theranos’s equipment could do all of the tests she promised — provided the technology is uploaded into it. She places the blame squarely on Balwani, claiming that he was wholly responsible for every decision at Theranos. At times, she’s convincing — her insistence that she doesn’t understand Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine comes to mind — but the film expects the audience to know that she’s deceptive. So its purpose is really to dig into her psyche rather than her guilt.
Does Holmes actually believe she’s innocent? Or is the entirety of her participation in the film another farce to sweep away negative perceptions of her? The film isn’t necessarily sympathetic towards her, but it does humanize her in certain ways. She spends most of her time with her children (both of whom were born after she was charged with fraud), and at times, seems genuinely clueless about where Theranos went wrong.
But when Holmes goes away, she loses her place as the central subject of the film. Instead, Fielder and Oppenheim become more interested in the documentary form’s relationship with truth and seeing. How truthful can reenactments be? Who do we trust to tell certain stories?
If the first half of the film asks the audience how much we can trust Holmes, the second half asks how much we can trust Fielder.
In one pivotal scene, Fielder and Seyfried travel to Evans’s house to inquire about some of his more controlling behaviors — namely, that he fought the filmmakers for a share of the film’s profits (almost unheard of in the documentary world), apparently without telling Holmes. Evans reveals that he holds power of attorney over Holmes, so he could gain access to her Twitter account and post on her behalf. Seyfried and Fielder are baffled (as was I!), but there’s an interesting question posed as the film continues. We realize it’s wrong for Evans to pose as Holmes on social media and make posts she wouldn’t approve of, but by including reenactments of conversations, Fielder and Seyfried are sort of doing the same thing.
Of course, there’s an obvious distinction between Evans and Seyfried impersonating Holmes. Evans uses Holmes’s name to attack people on Twitter and defend her name. Prior to seeing the film, I’d seen dozens of people online questioning how Holmes had access to social media while in prison. On the contrary, Seyfried’s portrayals of Holmes (both in The Dropout and You Can See Everything) are specifically noted to be reenactments. But even though Seyfried isn’t pretending to be Holmes, she’s still participating in warping how Holmes is perceived by the public.
This brings us to Fielder’s trustworthiness as a filmmaker. As the film progresses, he appears increasingly empathetic toward Holmes. He’s protective over her and is offended on her behalf by how Evans uses her image. In the final reenactment with Seyfried, he hurriedly changes a word that affects Holmes’s culpability in knowing Evans was being paid for the documentary. It’s a seemingly insignificant change, but it calls into question the credibility of everything we’ve seen for the past three hours. Who knows what word Holmes actually used, or if she was aware of Evans trying to get a payout for the film. Maybe Fielder actually had a revelation that he misremembered the conversation, or maybe he realized he was incriminating her and changed the phrasing to protect her.
We don’t know what actually happened, and that’s the point. It comes back to the title of the film: we may be capable of seeing everything, but can we actually see everything? Of course not. Even after witnessing a condensed month of Fielder living with Holmes, none of us are any closer to understanding her, and as we realize how Fielder’s objectivity has been compromised, we can’t necessarily trust the second half of the film either. The entire film is called into question, and it’s impossible to decipher what’s true and what isn’t. It’s such a fascinating deconstruction of the documentary as an art form.
Despite being promised full transparency and visibility, I left with more questions about Holmes than answers. We see what Fielder has chosen to show us, and none of us know what’s just outside of the frame.