SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “You Can See Everything,” now playing in theaters.
About halfway through Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything,” the film’s shock value ratchets up yet again. Even after a full-frontal scene from Holmes’ boyfriend Billy Evans and the convicted fraudster claiming she’s never told a lie, the movie dials it up to 11 with a meta appearance by actress Amanda Seyfried.
Seyfried memorably played the Theranos founder in Hulu’s 2022 series “The Dropout,” which Fielder shows Holmes and Evans for the first time — though it brings the real-life subject to tears. The documentary chronicles the 34 days ahead of Holmes’ 11-year prison sentence, and then Fielder introduces the Seyfried twist halfway through the film after Holmes is incarcerated.
Fielder recruits Seyfried to get her take on some of his odd interactions with Holmes once she’s gone, given that the actress won an Emmy for playing her on “The Dropout.” The meta-ness of Seyfried returning to play Holmes snowballs into her reenacting real-life moments that Fielder and Oppenheim couldn’t capture on camera. Alongside her is “East of Eden” actor Christopher Abbott, who plays Evans, albeit with a smaller role than Seyfried (who goes on to become a main character of the final half).
The two actors recreate a private negotiation between Fielder, Oppenheim and the A24 team that happened before filming for “You Can See Everything” commenced. In it, Seyfried (as Holmes) leaves the conversation to tend to her child, and Abbott (as Evans) demands that he be paid for participating in the documentary. Fielder and Oppenheim (as themselves) push back, arguing that paying the couple would severely discredit the film, but A24 relents and agrees to pay them.
The question then looms over the rest of the film: Did Holmes intentionally leave the room to have deniability on the sketchy payment, or did Evans go rogue and request the money by himself, leaving Holmes out of it? Fielder eventually visits Holmes in prison, where she says she didn’t know about the payment (which we later see recreated in a scene with Seyfried). At the end of the movie, it’s also revealed that Evans dropped his financial request, without further explanation.
In what is perhaps the film’s most meta moment, Seyfried (as Holmes) tells Fielder during their off-camera prison visit, “I don’t want that to happen ever again,” referencing “The Dropout.” In the conversation, Holmes rants about how awful it is that women would “do that” to other women, making a point that Seyfried and the entire “Dropout” team is at fault. She adds that so many of the women incarcerated with her believe that “The Dropout” depicted entirely real events.
Intercut with Seyfried playing Holmes in the prison visit, we see the actress (as herself) reading the script Fielder prepared with his actual conversation from Holmes. Reading Holmes’ accusations, Seyfried’s guard is immediately up. The actress argues that she “didn’t do that to [Holmes]. She did that to herself,” later adding, “it’s not lies. It’s fucking TV.”
Fielder, ever the documentarian, pushes back, questioning whether Seyfried’s scenes in “The Dropout” were completely accurate. Seyfried, still defensive, acknowledges she doesn’t know exactly what happened in Holmes’ life, but that the Theranos founder’s behavior led to assumptions about her, and that’s not Seyfried’s or the show’s fault. This aligns with something Seyfried says earlier in the film: “We’re working in fiction-land” but with “ridiculous amounts of research,” including 10 hours of deposition tapes that she referenced to prepare for her 2022 role.
Earlier in the doc, Seyfried told Fielder she will “reenact whatever you want me to reenact.” Fielder gently reminds her that she’s “not [Holmes],” prompting the actress to ask, “Guess how many people believed I was her when I played her?” She answers with a smile: “A lot.”
Through it all, Seyfried struggles to decipher Holmes. On one hand, she’s empathetic, noting that no woman would want to see another woman in a relationship with someone as manipulative as Evans. But on the other hand, she can’t quite tell whether Holmes is duping everyone — again — creating a push-and-pull between the actress and the imprisoned woman.
Viewers are also left wondering how authentic the film is. Fielder claims Seyfried’s re-created scenes are made using Holmes’ real speech, but we see Fielder develop a warmth toward Holmes. Seyfried questions if Fielder is protecting Holmes by showing a kinder depiction of her with their reenacted scenes. Is Fielder’s kinship with Holmes genuine, or is he playing a heightened version of himself in order to cast doubt on Holmes’ intentions?
The movie ends on a quote from a New York Times interview with Holmes about “The Dropout”: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” It’s a contentious quote for Holmes, who, throughout the film, asserts that the New York Times misquoted her, who claims she said “a character they created” rather than the attributed “I.” The Times reporter has maintained that the quote is accurate. That single, hotly debated word makes all the difference, and viewers are left to wonder whether the on-camera version of Holmes we see is the real deal or a fictionalized dramatization of the real-life woman.