PLOT: Thirty days before she is due to begin her eleven-year prison sentence, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes invites documentarians Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her home, granting them unrestricted access to their subject.
REVIEW: As I was walking out of the press screening for A24’s You Can See Everything, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen something revolutionary that would certainly shake up the traditional documentary format. This notion was echoed by a filmmaker friend of mine who tagged along, saying that it would be up there with Grey Gardens and Hoop Dreams in the way it changed the idea of what could be done with the form. Indeed, You Can See Everything is unlike any documentary you’ve ever seen before. In some ways, I’d hesitate to even call it a doc. It’s more of a nonfiction narrative that plays with the form, goes in deliberately meta directions, and tackles bigger questions than simply whether Holmes deserves to be in prison or whether she’s a sociopath.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim seem less concerned with Holmes’ actual guilt than with answering another question: Why does Elizabeth Holmes, presented with a mountain of evidence, seem incapable of admitting that the technology that made her—for a time—the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire was a lie? On camera, Holmes maintains to Fielder that she’s never knowingly told a lie in her entire life. He challenges her repeated on this, but she never backs down. But, to her what is a lie? To us it’s a knowingly untrue statement, but Holmes (seemingly) doesn’t have that kind of lens – or at least that’s what she’s trying to make us believe. The film presents her as someone whose way of processing information can be difficult to fathom, something Fielder memorably illustrates when he shows her the old Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” and she seems unable to understand the joke. Or, does she actually get it, and this is all just another con? At a certain point, Fielder seemingly becomes somewhat taken in by her—until that reaction, and what it says about both him and the way her rise was unchecked, becomes the point of the film.
The movie is at its most fascinating when depicting the relationship she has with her partner, Billy Evans, who comes across as controlling and clashes with Fielder repeatedly. He appears to use Holmes and her notoriety as a kind of mouthpiece, even posting his own thoughts on her X feed, which he justifies by claiming he knows her so well that he knows this is what she’d post anyway. With his introduction, Fielder and Oppenheim seem to have conveniently found their villain, but it’s not as simple as that. Were that the case, You Can See Everything would be ninety minutes but just when you think it’s ending, the second – even more fascinating half – begins.
About ninety minutes in Holmes goes off to serve her sentence, leaving Fielder to continue without her—but this is where the film becomes truly boundary-pushing. He gets unexpected help figuring out how to finish his movie, in a way that not only blurs the line between fact and fiction but also introduces an important third-party perspective that challenges his conclusions about Holmes. I won’t reveal how this is done, but it’s a surprise worth protecting.
You Can See Everything is actually my first time watching anything Fielder has done, as I’ve yet to dig into his body of work. However, his unusual presence and perspective make him an ideal match for a story such as this. While the film runs a lengthy three hours, the running time feels necessary, as does its feature format. Breaking it up into a limited series would kill the movie’s momentum, which builds and builds.
It’s an interesting contrast to Oppenheim’s other movie this year, Primetime, which turned a critical eye on another style of nonfiction filmmaking. While I didn’t feel that film was particularly successful, You Can See Everything strikes me as a monumental achievement—not only as a film but also as a way of pushing the documentary form forward. It’s utterly compelling, and the definitive depiction of a story that’s already been told to death through documentaries, a TV series (The Dropout), and tons of articles and books. It’s a movie that wrestles with an enigma while refusing to tell us what to think or feel. It answers questions with other questions and will likely become one of the most talked-about films of the year.
