‘You Can See Everything’ Is One of the Best Documentaries of All Time

A recent trend in documentaries and docuseries is to tell you a story you know by filling in the blanks. You leave with a sense of, “Yeah, that sounds about right,” knowing slightly more than you did when you entered. At first blush, a documentary about Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes seems like it would fall into that basket—the con artist is still a con artist. But You Can See Everything directors Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder aren’t interested in such an easy route, nor are they out to rehabilitate Holmes’ image with a soft-focus feature. Instead, they hit Holmes with a spotlight that diffuses outwards, turning a look at Holmes and our fabulist, parasocial moment into one where she becomes both architect and material, trapped in a public persona of her own design. She becomes a way for others, including her family, the filmmakers, and the audience, to use as a showcase to their own ends. Most documentaries aspire to tell the truth, but if everyone is building their own truth around a famous liar, then what? You Can See Everything rides a razor’s edge to explore this question, and at a brisk, sharply funny three hours, it arrives at being one of the best documentaries ever made.

Beginning in 2023, seven years after the Theranos scandal broke and Elizabeth Holmes and her co-conspirator/boyfriend Sunny Balwani were convicted of defrauding investors, Holmes is now 34 days away from going to federal prison for 11 years. She and her partner Billy Evans have allowed Nathan Fielder, the documentarian/comedian behind such shows as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, to stay with them in San Diego and record their lives. Nathan asks straightforward questions like, “Have you ever told a lie?” which still don’t yield straightforward answers from the dissembling Holmes. Furthermore, the closer he gets to Elizabeth and Billy, the stranger they appear, hustling for investor funding on a new med-tech venture despite Elizabeth’s imminent incarceration, for, you know, med-tech fraud.

One of the many clever aspects of You Can See Everything is how it plays with public perception. Fielder and Oppenheim know that if you’re coming to see a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, you've probably formed some kind of opinion on her, whether it’s through the news, John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood, or the Emmy-winning Hulu series The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried. Moreover, since she’s going to prison for deceiving investors, she is about as untrustworthy as you can get. What can be gained from interviewing a liar except for more lies? It may be entertaining to watch Holmes try to roll Fielder, but what can we learn from that? 

Fielder approaches Holmes less like a public figure who needs to clear her name and more like a guileless child asking a magician how they did the trick. This approach is more about trying to see how Holmes views herself, which is a fascinating avenue to go down because it upends the traditional notion of a liar knowing the truth and choosing to obfuscate anyway. Instead, Fielder probes the notion that someone who is an inveterate liar will naturally lie to themselves as well, which doesn’t forgive Holmes, but also allows us to understand why she thinks she’s innocent and misunderstood. 

It harkens back to a line early in the film where Holmes and Evans have beef with a New York Times profile and the line quoting her on those playing her in a show like The Dropout: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Evans and Holmes claim she never said that and they record all interviews from their side, although they never produce proof contrary to the Times’ story. Similar to how Holmes and Evans are hard at work on a new version of Theranos, they appear to see that previous persona as Holmes 1.0, and this is Holmes 2.0, and it would be great if you acknowledged the newer model as the “real one.” Fielder seems as bewildered as the audience that Holmes not only refuses to acknowledge the harm she caused, but also the striking similarities between her current situation (an overbearing partner, hustling for investor cash on the promise of transformative medical technology) mirrors what’s about to land her in prison. Her lies had real consequences, but her ongoing lies (or are they delusions?) only further entrap her. Holmes appears to rest her current identity on the thin premise that there’s a meaningful distinction between “the character” and “me” beyond changing her look from Silicon Valley chic to loving, overworked mom.

Fielder doesn’t try to redeem Holmes, but at least from what we see of him in this movie (and trapped in a funhouse, it’s tough to see who’s performing even when the magician is showing you the mechanics of his trick), he does seem to at least pity her. The film has a clearer villain in Evans, whose inflated sense of self-confidence and desire to control the narrative are papered over with the idea of “love.” He knows his partner’s wishes even if she doesn’t verbally communicate those desires. This behavior reflects and refracts on Fielder, who knows that as a filmmaker and storyteller his work is inherently manipulative, but wonders if he’s being as crass and selfish towards Holmes as Evans. 

Here, Oppenheim and Fielder could have taken an easy out—we’re all liars, we all tell ourselves stories to live, no one is innocent. But there’s an underlying morality to Fielder’s investigation and to the project as a whole: deception is wrong, and the line between deception and art is that in art, we know we’re being deceived and we allow it because it can arrive at truth. You Can See Everything comes as close to the line between deception and art as possible without tipping over, and the ethics of the piece matter to Oppenheim and Fielder. However, we can’t discount how artists can have a vision different from their subjects. Are the directors trying to understand this infamous figure, or are they using her as a commodity? What’s the line between highlighting the “real” Elizabeth and merely replicating the Holmes 2.0 she and Evans seek to present? 

These are tough questions with no easy answers, and through its various developments and devices, You Can See Everything feels designed to keep you off-balance and your head spinning. While those who are familiar with the past work of Fielder and Oppenheim may have slightly firmer footing by understanding how they approach documentary—leaning into its artifice while keeping the interactions unpredictable—there’s still a bracing energy throughout the piece, partly arising from Fielder’s comic persona of glares and withering delivery of “Okay,” at the craziest statements you’ll ever hear in your life. You also have a look that’s familiar to Oppenheim’s documentaries, full of close-ups and eerie music. The other part comes from the sheer audacity of not only Holmes and Evans, but how the filmmakers attempt to match their subjects and suitably capture the behavior. It’s a collision of art and deception, and we get to watch the fireworks.

And yet it’s never a cheap laugh despite the already-memed teaser trailer of “Why would I deceive you?” You Can See Everything feels attuned to our culture where liars run rampant, major outlets feel reluctant to call out fabrications as “lies,” and the Internet has not only supercharged the spread of these falsehoods, but also the parasocial joy we feel in condemning those who lie. Holmes’ downfall gives us the satisfaction that someone, anyone, would be held accountable for misleading people, but aside from putting her in prison, deceit rolls on unabated. The attempts of You Can See Everything to cut through the deception only warps reality further, leaving us closer to Holmes than ever before: with a brittle, fragile, blinkered outlook on the world that's all we have to cling to. However you leave the film regarding your thoughts on Holmes, You Can See Everything cascades into larger questions regarding the nature of documentary, leaving its mark as a film both current and indelible, and embracing the futility and necessity of constructing reality built on lies.

You Can See Everything opens in theaters on October 16. 

David Chen's Quick Take

Like Matt, I'm also enamored of You Can See Everything. A movie that starts one place and spirals out like a fractal until its conclusion leaves you questioning everything. Here are some of my brief, non-spoilery thoughts. -David Chen