Tell all your friends to see it before someone spoils it. That’s the guiding mantra behind the brilliant marketing campaign of You Can See Everything. Ever since its surprise world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month, this extraordinary, category-busting docudrama has been generating buzz even as its biggest twists remain largely hidden from view. Not since Alfred Hitchcock begged audiences to keep the ending of Psycho a secret has the awareness around a movie stemmed in large part from what it doesn’t want you to know.
The difference between now and 1960 is that, well, good luck keeping anything a secret these days. Still, the experience of You Can See Everything does make the case for audience complicity in its elements of surprise, and I’ll respect that logic here. Read on for a spoiler-free experience. The spoilers that count, that is.
Co-directed by documentarian Lance Oppenheim (whose narrative debut Primetime opened just a few weeks ago) and hidden camera comic Nathan Fielder (from Comedy Central’s Nathan For You and HBO’s The Rehearsal), the movie focuses on the final month of freedom experienced by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before she begins her 11-year prison sentence. Fielder’s deadpan delivery, paired with Oppenheim’s operatic filmmaking style, lends a cosmic sense of uncertainty to every moment, as the movie adds new layers of narrative intrigue around its subject. The reality of the project —the conditions behind its existence and even its very status as a documentary — grows increasingly blurry as it moves along, and everyone who sees it emerges with a different take on Holmes’ character.
After all, she’s tough to define. Holmes is the 42-year-old entrepreneur who defrauded investors as well as government regulators with her phony health technology, the Edison, which she claimed could perform blood tests for virtually any condition and in fact did … nothing much. Three years into her prison sentence, Holmes continues to proclaim her innocence, a factor that sits at the center of You Can See Everything as the core mystery around which several others revolve.
A petite blond woman with sharp blue eyes and a Cheshire Cat grin, Holmes presents a striking visual contrast to contemporary entrepreneurship. While she proclaims herself shy, she launched her career as a media darling, in direct opposition to the archetypes of masculine billionaires dominating the business ecosystem. Once her fortunes turned, she was publicly shamed, reviled, and effectively sent into exile even before her sentence started.
Some call that justice. Holmes may be a victim of her own behavior, and fortunately, You Can See Everything doesn’t make a simple case for sympathy. When Fielder finds her, 34 days before she’s required to report to a Texas prison, she’s renting out a solitary beachfront property with her husband Billy Evans and their two small children. Holmes and Evans allow Fielder to record their daily lives in an apparent bid to clear her name, although Fielder and his team remain dubious about the precise motivations in play.
“It’s easy to hold up this myth around someone when you don’t know who they are,” says Billy in the movie’s first scene, and of course, that’s true: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of people willing to lie, cheat, and steal at all costs? Watching You Can See Everything, one doesn’t exactly start to trust Holmes, though the filmmakers’ use of intimate closeups inject nearly every moment with constant ambiguity. The movie runs just under three hours but maintains the gripping momentum of a first-rate thriller (Hitchcock himself would approve), and it’s never quite clear who’s putting one over on us at any moment: Holmes, Evans, or Fielder himself.
If you’ve never heard of the guy, all you need to know is that Fielder hosted the cult comedy series Nathan 4 You, which he describes in the movie as “a show about corrupt businesses,” though Holmes claims she had no idea about his past exploits. His more recent program, The Rehearsal, bears some similarities to You Can See Everything in that it toys around with a dramatic tone and forces you to accept it. Fielder’s humor contains multitudes: He’s a stone-faced jester who moonlights as a modern-day muckraker.
Fielder acknowledges upfront that Holmes may have allowed him into her home — rather than the countless traditional journalists who made similar requests — because he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who could interrogate her in a serious fashion. This leads to more than a few gripping showdowns as he pushes back on her oddball remarks (such as the assertion that she’s never told a lie) or finds unusual means of questioning her claims.
In one of the more striking first-act sequences, Fielder has Holmes and Evans watch the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First Routine” before having a serious conversation about the root of the joke. Holmes either doesn’t get it, or pretends she doesn’t get it, leading to a fascinating discussion of the syntactic trickery at the root of the Theranos scheme. She never said the blood kit worked the way people thought it would, she claims, only that it could work that way. Who’s on first indeed. (For the record: Even my four-year-old gets the joke. Holmes didn’t fool me on this one.)
Fielder navigates the delicate circumstances of his subject’s imminent incarceration with a number of compelling devices, including an extended scene in which he forces her to watch The Dropout, the 2022 TV series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. That particular representation ultimately becomes central to understanding the Russian Doll of performances unfolding in front of Fielder’s camera. It’s possible to feel bad for Holmes and feel bad about feeling bad for her at the same time. This movie will make you want you watch, or rewatch, The Dropout in a whole new light.
You Can See Everything plays off several narrative traditions at once. At times, it unfolds like a shadowy immersion into half truths and cultish maneuvering reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master; I also thought of Laura Poitras’ Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, which similarly captured the fallout of a historic figure with riveting momentum. More than anything, though, I thought of my favorite movie ever: Orson Welles’ For for Fake.
The last movie that Welles completed, this 1973 docu-fiction finds the polymathic storyteller guiding the audience through the exploits of a famous art forger as well as his biographer, who ends up being a forger himself. And so, perhaps, is Welles — the magician pulling the strings of every image we see. This hall of mirrors gets deep.
At the time of its production, only cinema could transform the truth into a porous subject. That attribute expanded to social media in the first decade of the 20th century, and by 2010, the movies took note: Banksy’s Oscar-winning Exit Through the Gift Shop explores the antics of an artist who may or may not be real, while Catfish revolves around a woman who lies about her age (and virtually everything else) on Facebook.
Just in time for You Can See Everything, the age of ambiguity has entered another phase, as society is constantly forced to question the reality of even the most realistic moving images. You Can See Everything ultimately doubles back on itself a few times over, allowing for several conspiratorial possibilities to converge: Is Holmes a victim of her husband’s own schemes, is Fielder falling in love, and is anything that happens in the last hour or so of this movie really unfolding as we see it play out? Also: When a movie positions its questions with such cunning precision, what difference does it make? Enjoy the ride.
In the weeks since its debut, You Can See Everything has generated speculation that it could become the first documentary in history to score an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. For years, this has been a tough proposition for non-fiction cinema. Documentaries are typically perceived as a standalone genre, deserving of their own category, shunted to the side of the biggest awards season conversations. The time has come to change that.
I hate to brag, but what the hell: I’ve been covering the absence of documentaries in the Best Picture category for years, and made the case back in 2021 that two of the year’s finest cinematic achievements were documentaries that deserved the designation. Back then, I spoke with many Oscar voters who were either unaware that documentaries never cracked Best Picture or opposed to the possibility.
The 1994 basketball epic Hoop Dreams was the first documentary to launch a serious Best Picture campaign, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 followed it. Since then, documentaries have snuck into a few other categories, including Best International Feature and Best Original Song. The documentary branch has grown more international and expansive in its preferences, but the entire Academy of Oscar voters is a different story.
However, if the next round of Oscar nominations — announced on January 27 — include You Can See Everything in the Best Picture category, it will mark a historic turning point for the medium. The market for non-fiction filmmaking has struggled in recent years. Too many traditional talking-head documentaries homogenized the form and created the impression that the non-fiction seeks only to inform or entertain in clearly-defined formats.
You Can See Everything is the latest evidence that art requires no such borders. You have to watch it to understand what it’s doing, and pass the word around, because everyone’s opinion will vary. That makes it essential viewing, not just hype, and endows it with the kind of authenticity no Oscar campaign can buy. When movies fail to deliver, all the marketing hoopla falls into the ether, but at its best awards season elevates work that might otherwise struggle to make some noise. Nominated or not, You Can See Everything is worthy of all the “For Your Consideration” ads it can get.
You Can See Everything is now showing at the Southampton Playhouse.