You Can See Everything ★★★1/2
Availability: See end of review.
Searching for the “real” Elizabeth Holmes—and Nathan Fielder
It may be significant that a film with an unmemorable title about “seeing” opens with Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’s partner (they share 2 children but are not married) lying on his back, his face photographed at an angle that reveals only the white of his eyeball. We can’t see “everything” and neither can Billy. Or the title refers to Billy’s penis, featured in a gratuitous shower scene.
This is the place: a rental house on the beach in San Diego County was the setting
for most of the documentary. At left is Elizabeth Holmes, at far right is her interlocutor
and the co-director Nathan Fielder. In the center is the other co-director,
Lance Oppenheim (who does not appear in the film). Holmes and
Billy Evans's toddler William is in the background, perched on a stool or high chair.
It’s hard to know what to make of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s 3-hour opus, a fascinating gonzo documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans, filmed mostly in the spring of 2023, in the weeks before Holmes began serving her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors and patients of the defunct Theranos, Inc. Fielder’s role is complex. He’s a protagonist, often filmed, as are Billy and Holmes, in extreme closeup, as if seeing every pore and facial imperfection will reveal the “authentic” person. But as the interviewer he’s also outside their frame, a combination of Socrates the inquirer, Freud the psychiatrist, and Chomsky the linguist. He’s been invited into the Evans/Holmes household because his alternative, idiosyncratic approach seems to promise that he’ll arrive as a tabula rasa, without preconceived notions of his subject. And because, as he senses, he doesn’t know enough science to evaluate what went wrong at Theranos.
Fielder’s role is complex, a combination of Socrates the inquirer, Freud the psychiatrist, and Chomsky the linguist.
What Fielder is not is Clarence Darrow. He’s not there to retry Holmes (except in the most indirect way), and there’s no suggestion that he has sifted through and weighed the evidence presented at her trial. He is not interested in whether she meets the criminal standard of guilt. He’s there to get a fresh measure of this woman who dropped out of Stanford at 19 and in 2003 founded a company that claimed to have revolutionized blood testing, that made her for a time the world’s first female billionaire, and who was found by a jury to have committed fraud.
“I’m literal,” Holmes says. She insists she has never lied—not ever—to anyone, about anything, and she asserts she has committed no crimes.
The “Liz” that emerges (that’s what Fielder calls her) is earnest, even pathologically so. She can’t follow jokes and doesn’t tell any. Irony is beyond her; “I’m literal,” she says. With the weight of that surfeit of sincerity, and with those watery blue eyes, she insists she has never lied—not ever—to anyone, about anything, and she asserts she has committed no crimes. Although she can’t remember if she invented one of the Theranos components (“I don’t know if I…” is a repeated phrase), she and Billy apparently believe they’re well on their way to blood-testing success with what they call Theranos 2, a company operating out of one room, somewhere, with, Billy says, “lasers.” Repeatedly, Liz says, she wants someone to tell her truth.
To evaluate Holmes’s lingual facility, he plays for her the storied Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First?”, which Holmes fails to grasp.
Language is important to Fielder’s probe. He explores the idea that Holmes’s problems may be related to a failure to understand and appreciate the nuances of words. In the past, she claimed that the Theranos machine “can do hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood.” What, Fielder asks, did the word “can” mean to Holmes? That the machine as constituted could, actually, do 100 tests? Or that the machine, once perfected and in tandem with the appropriate, not-yet-extant software, would be capable of doing 100 tests? She seems not to understand the difference. To evaluate Holmes’s lingual facility, he plays for her the storied Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First?”, which Holmes fails to grasp. Case closed. For Fielder, anyway. Holmes may not have lied to investors. She just didn’t use the right words.
Nathan Fielder
(seen from the back, left) and Holmes are photographed in extreme close-ups, and he is often "in her face," probing her for answers. Her big blue eyes dominate her face—and the screen.
Oppenheim is known for his quirky, off-beat documentary style and subjects (“Some Kind of Heaven” [2020] on life for those 55+ in The Villages, a Florida gated community of 100,000), and Fielder for his TV series, “Rehearsal,” in which he stages mind-blowingly accurate settings for people to “rehearse” their next steps in life. The co-directors eschew normal documentary techniques, like those used by pioneer Frederick Wiseman (who never put himself in the narrative), and adopt—with a kind of vengeance—the first-person documentary style of Ross McElwee (“Remake” 2025).
Oppenheim and Fielder employ fiction, starting with clips from “The Dropout” (2022), the TV series on Holmes’s rise and fall, starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. They bring in Seyfried to stage re-enactments. Presumably, Fielder thinks his techniques are more likely to get to the bottom of Holmes’s character than any courtroom ever could.
In bits and pieces, the film offers the possibility that Holmes is, and has been, vulnerable to men, in the sense that men are able to get her to do things that she would not do if she were in control. The issue emerges in the “egg” scene, recorded in the kitchen, where Holmes is whisking some eggs in a bowl while Billy watches. Billy then takes the bowl from Holmes and whisks the eggs more aggressively—the right way, he says, demonstrating Billy’s controlling behavior (which Seyfried, who sees patriarchy everywhere, jumps at).
That behavior is especially prominent in the last third of the film, when Holmes is in a Texas prison. Not only does Billy have her power of attorney (not unreasonable in that circumstance), but he posts and texts angry and expletive-laden material in her name, without her knowledge—creating her character for her (that is, not “her truth”). She tosses off her partner’s actions with, “that’s just Billy.” Cue the Seyfried eyeroll. Billy aside, Holmes is at the same time disturbed by others (the media, especially) defining her character. Fielder returns more than once to a quote from her in a New York Times profile (and it ends the film before the credits): “You are not seeing me. You are seeing the character I created.” Holmes asserts she was misquoted, that she said: “You are not seeing me. You are seeing the character they created.”
Substantial stretches of the film are taken up with Seyfried. Why one should care what Seyfried thinks is not clear, although she represents a viewpoint Fielder might not want to express himself, for fear of being considered biased. And at a critical point Seyfried accuses Fielder of liking Holmes to the extent of wanting to protect her, an accusation that cuts to the heart of his self-image as an unbiased documentarian.
Fielder, who seems not a little obsessed with maintaining the standards of a documentary (in spite of his use of fiction and re-creations), gives considerable weight to one particular incident. It’s a big deal for Fielder when he learns that Holmes and Billy may have conspired to be paid for their participation in the documentary (jeopardizing their objectivity), and that Holmes may have intentionally left the negotiations over money with A24 executives in order to establish plausible deniability—a sign that Holmes is less than honest and authentic. Yet later, when Holmes, in high earnest mode, says she was not interested in the film in a monetary way, Seyfried and Fielder agree she’s telling the truth. And maybe she is.
In a scene at the prison, Fielder—at this point deeply suspicious of Billy’s motives and conduct, and having observed the two as they interact—reverses course. “I didn’t see anything but love,” he tells Seyfried. Sure, that settles it.
Holmes and Evans think they can resurrect a failed company and create Theranos 2. Fielder thinks he can figure out what’s going on with this odd couple, starting with how the eggs are whisked. They all over-estimate their powers.
Holmes and Evans think they can resurrect a failed company and create Theranos 2. Fielder thinks he can figure out what’s going on with this odd couple, starting with how the eggs are whisked. They all over-estimate their powers. Fielder believes that his is the way to authenticity, to figuring out someone’s character. Instead, he leaves one grasping for the truth, his questions a kind of menu for the viewer to pick and choose which answers to assemble to determine who this woman is. When one dives into the intellectual guts of the film, it’s as messy as a much-used Denny’s menu. And yet, leaving the theater after seeing this tour de force by one of the most creative people in the industry, all you can think is that you’ve just had a refreshing, mesmerizing, outside-the-box cinematic experience.
He says: Reviewing this film requires mastery of words such as “apparently,” “seems,” and “maybe.” Perhaps that indeterminacy has some appeal in an otherwise polarized age.
She says: Seyfried at times seems to morph into Holmes, a metaphor for fiction morphing into fact, for our inability to find any truth.
Date: 2026
Directors: Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder
Starring: Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, Nathan Fielder, Amanda Seyfried (as themselves, and Seyfried also as Holmes)
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 174 minutes
Other Awards: 8 nominations to date
Availability: Showing widely in theaters in the US and Canada and kept in theaters longer because of its unexpected and massive success—the highest rated documentary in the US in 15 years (US box office to date of $64 million on an investment of $7 million). Staggered releases in theaters internationally, beginning mid-November. Rent or purchase options on sites such as Amazon Prime and Apple TV expected mid-to late November. Expected on Max in mid-February. See JustWatch here for up-to-date availability across all platforms.
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