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It feels important to mention from the jump that I’m an Elizabeth Holmes neophyte. When I went to see You Can See Everything, I had no more than a passing knowledge of the Theranos scandal that broke in the early 2010s. I never read Bad Blood, nor did I watch the many documentaries or the Hulu miniseries, starring Amanda Seyfried and Sayid from Lost, that centered on Holmes's fraud. But I nevertheless went into YCSE energized off nothing more than the strength of Nathan Fielder. After two seasons of The Rehearsal—the second of which I once declared the TV Event of the Decade—I will follow him down any rabbit hole with a certainty that the journey will be unpredictable but ultimately rewarding.
You Can See Everything delivers, particularly once the film shifts on its axis and mutates into another reality-bending, genre-defying Fielder joint. After weeks spent documenting Elizabeth Holmes’s life, and nowhere closer to a clear answer about her motives or psychology, Fielder enlists Seyfried herself to help his quest. Up to that point, YCSE is compelling and beguiling, painting Holmes’ as tragic, bizarre, deceitful and earnest, sometimes all in one sequence. But it’s still just a documentary, albeit a great one. Once Seyfried enters the fray, the film becomes something more delicious and complicated, the grand summation of all the work Fielder’s been doing on HBO and elsewhere over the last decade.
Seyfried’s appearance was spoiled for me before I watched the film (in a work meeting, no less). But even for someone obsessed with going in ice-cold, merely knowing that she appears doesn’t quite prepare you for the impact of her participation. Seyfried is essentially the co-star of Everything’s third act, facilitating an experiment whereby she reprises her role in The Dropout to help Fielder reenact his conversations with Holmes—and litigate some truths about himself as well. It’s essentially a blockbuster version of what Fielder’s been doing on The Rehearsal, where each season brings him closer to an organizing theory of artifice and sincerity, often submitting himself as a case study (as he did on Nathan For You).
But You Can See Everything is his Big One. In Holmes, Fielder has finally found his match, someone whose motivations are equally sphinx-like. And in Seyfried he’s found a similarly game collaborator willing to call him out on his own narrative contrivances. It’s a Russian Nesting Doll of meta-agendas and one-upmanship. Critics agree, and in a first for Fielder, the commercial returns do too. (At press time, it’s overperforming with a box office haul around $23 million, including $15 million from its first weekend which ranks as the second-biggest documentary opening weekend ever.) We’ve gone from The Rehearsal being woefully snubbed at the Emmys to pundits already debating how far YCSE can go in the Oscars race. All told, it’s a perfect grand finale to Fielder’s years-long run of increasingly byzantine schemes.
When I talked to Fielder briefly a few weeks ago at an after-party for Primetime (but before I had seen his new movie), he mentioned that he’d been mulling over some early ideas for a third season of The Rehearsal and breathed a sigh of relief, only half-jokingly, when I told him to take his time. You Can See Everything is, in a lot of ways, a jumbo-sized third season and a clip-emptying endeavor. But instead of being the end of something, it feels as if it might allow Fielder to unlock an entirely new level of exploration. I left the film thinking about the type of havoc he could wreak in a more fictional context. Because for all the conversation YCSE is generating about its place in the canon of form-bending documentaries, it called to my mind two classic narrative features.
Watching Fielder dress Seyfried up just so in the third act recalled the perverseness of Jimmy Stewart’s deranged GRWM sequence with Kim Novak in the third act of Vertigo, a connection Fielder practically invites with some notable Bernard Hermann-esque flourishes to composer Ari Balouzian’s score.
And, by the time it ended, I was also thinking about Christopher Nolan, particularly his propensity to return to one specific image several times over the course of his films, each time with a new context and a deeper meaning—and usually one last time close to or in the final shot. The connection may seem tenuous, sure. But consider the fact that, back in 2023, Big Chris himself hosted a special Q&A screening of The Curse, the most underrated of Fielder’s projects. Imagine what kind of havoc Nolan and Fielder could wreak together.