A little more than a month before her 11-year prison sentence, enigmatic fraudster Elizabeth Holmes invited Nathan Fielder, a documentarian known for using his awkwardness to pull sensitive information from his participants, to film herself, her partner and her children to form a “complete” picture of their lives to improve her reputation. “FYI…you really can see everything,” Holmes texts after encouraging Fielder to stay in their house while filming. Ironically, the further this three-hour psychological examination progresses, the less we find out about who Elizabeth Holmes really is.
Throughout the film Holmes consistently refutes a quote reported by The New York Times in which she (allegedly) says, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” The question co-directors Lance Oppenheim and Fielder pose is similar: who is the character and who is getting played? This is not a film investigating if Holmes intentionally lied about the effectiveness of biomedical technology.
“You Can See Everything” is about its own making: Fielder’s investigation of Holmes becomes just as much a portrait of Fielder himself. It’s a film about itself.
The investigation into Holmes was not as easy as it may have seemed. It is abundantly clear that in some ways Holmes herself may not know if she is lying. She is, after all, a professional liar. Her biotech company Theranos hailed a breakthrough in the field because she claimed to have developed a machine which could perform hundreds of blood tests with a miniscule sample, which it was not capable of doing. In 2015 a series of investigations by the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on the legitimacy of Holmes’ machine. In 2022 she was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
“You Can See Everything” was supposed to cover only the last 35 days before Holmes’ prison sentence began, and if a different crew covered this story perhaps that would have been the result; not outstanding but proficient. Fielder opened the door far wider. Known for his participatory work, Fielder crafted his own brand of metafictitious documentary filmmaking in which he plays a caricature of himself in the series “Nathan For You” and “The Rehearsal.”
In his latest and densest work, this monolith of postmodern cinema not only follows the 35 days before Holmes began her sentence but also the three years afterward in which her partner Billy Evans attempted to unilaterally remake Theranos. As soon as she enters prison, the real exploration of Holmes begins. The second half of the film is feverish and baffling; her absence emphasizes just how enigmatic Holmes is because we find out more about her when she is gone than when she is present. One could even argue that the second half of the film becomes less and less of a documentary as it progresses.
During production, producer-distributor A24 had no idea if this project would even see the light of day. Oppenheim and Fielder had even less confidence in it. They filmed for 16 hours each day with a seven-person crew in the Holmes residence in the off chance something interesting happened, and only found the direction of the project when crew members couldn’t agree if Holmes and Evans were telling the truth on the basic questions Fielder posed.
In the first hour of the film, Holmes allows Fielder to examine the miracle machine she was working on at Theranos. She explains that the machine cannot perform more than a dozen of the tests it is theoretically trained to do. Instead, she claims it is capable of performing the hundreds of tests as advertised…so long as the chemistry for each test exists. Holmes’ wording is what caused so much confusion and not deliberate deception, or so we’re led to believe. Fielder tests this theory about Holmes’ subpar communication skills by showing her the classic Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First?” comedy routine, in which she is incapable of identifying the joke to be that “who” is the name of the person on first base and not a question asking who is literally standing on first base.
Except…in a recent interview by Inc. newsletters, Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schultz revealed that the machine Holmes let Fielder investigate was not even the machine Theranos was working on at all. Instead it was a future prototype far more accurate than the original device. She deliberately showed Fielder a device that would make her look better. What else did she hide from him? Was she also lying about not getting “Who’s on First?” to look less competent? Once again, we ask, who is the character and who is getting played?
“You Can See Everything” explores the lowest depths of what truth really means, and questions if it even exists at all.
This review was written spoiler-free not to spare readers from knowing how the film ends, but because exploring the nuances of the film’s infinite layers to any decent extent would take much more than 800 words.
You must see it to believe it. It is an outstanding expansion of documentary filmmaking; it is at the very least a landmark in the form and at most a reinvention of the genre altogether.
Grade: A+