Elizabeth Holmes absolutely lives up to the hype

About a third of the way through “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, we watch the disgraced Theranos founder and convicted fraudster pose for the camera — more than 200 of them, to be exact.

In the days before she reported to federal prison in 2023, Holmes had her likeness captured and scanned so she can be reproduced via video, hologram and artificial intelligence while she’s locked up.

It’s partly a business decision — she and partner William “Billy” Evans, with whom she shares two children, are launching a new healthcare startup (which they refer to as Theranos 2.0), and it might be useful to have access to a version of Holmes that can be programmed, say, to give pitches. And yet, we see Holmes crying.

She’s been hurt before by putting her image too far out into the public. “I have a weird history with being on camera,” she says, sobbing.

Thanks to “You Can See Everything,” that history is only getting weirder.

The pre-release buzz around this new movie, which was made in secret and revealed via a surprise trailer that dropped last month, has been near deafening.

Some of the critics who had been privy to its secrets have boldly declared it “the movie of the year” or wondered whether it might even become the first documentary to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture.

With the film opening in theaters across the US on Friday, audiences now have their turn to see what all the fuss is about.

Fielder’s movie is a wholly unique and revolutionary one. Thanks to the unparalleled access to Holmes and her family in the days before her incarceration (at one point we even see Evans showering nude), as well as some truly jaw-dropping creative decisions later in the movie, the film is gripping and shocking. It is a bold, perhaps impossible, quest for truth about someone whom Fielder compares to a magician. At one point, he wonders if she may just be the most manipulative person who has ever lived.

Rarely, if ever, has a documentarian and subject been so perfectly matched. Through his shows “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” Fielder has established himself as someone pathologically obsessed with elaborate schemes, awkwardness, meta narratives and things that are not what they first appear. In these programs, Fielder plays both the straight man and the chaos agent, often appearing like an alien in human disguise sent to study our most inexplicable behavior, even if it means meddling in things himself.

If Fielder is again playing a version of himself here, Holmes seems to be offering near infinite versions of herself up for examination, like a set of unblinking reflections in a hall of funhouse mirrors. As the movie progresses, Fielder and the audience must question whether and how they’re being deceived. Is Holmes just weird, as Evans, her partner, insists? A victim of the men in her life, as her father seems to believe? Someone who may be on the spectrum and incapable of understanding how others perceive her words, as a revelatory sequence involving Holmes’ reaction to the Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First” sketch seems to suggest? Or is she just a compulsive liar who has somehow managed to delude even herself?

“The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true. So what is the reality?” Holmes says in the movie. It’s a question that hovers over the entire production and one that isn’t easily answered.

Co-directed by Fielder and Oppenheim, the latter of whom released “Primetime” also under the A24 banner last month, “You Can See Everything” is somehow visually gorgeous and yet profoundly ugly — almost intentionally so. Much of it is filmed in extreme close-up, replete with zits, wrinkles and sweat on Fielder and Holmes, as if we’re studying them under a microscope. As befitting Fielder’s style for leaning into artifice, we often see the crew and their boom mics, as they work to create something that ultimately mixes reality and recreation, fact and fiction.

A surprise person appears halfway through the movie — one being kept a closely guarded secret from audiences and which we won’t spoil here — but whose presence transforms it entirely, emerging as both co-documentarian and co-subject. “We’re working in Fiction Land,” this person astutely observes at one point. That feels like an understatement.

Fielder is a refreshingly candid guide through this strange land. He’s open about his insecurities as to why Holmes wanted him to capture her — does his lack of scientific understanding mean he’ll be an easy mark? — and the movie offers the case that he may have grown too close to or fond of his subject. When one person remarks that Holmes may be a victim of Stockholm Syndrome under Evans, viewers can only wonder if the same can be said for Fielder and Holmes.

When Holmes does eventually report to federal prison in Texas, she does so after Fielder injects his trademark cringe into her last moments of freedom, suggesting he leave Holmes and Evans alone so they can have sex — then asking how it was — and offering her a gag gift in front of her parents of hair dye and sunglasses so that she can go on the run. Then, as she prepares to get into the car to leave Fielder, they embrace and stare awkwardly at one another until we finally hear the words, “You’ve got this.”

But it’s not Fielder who says this to Holmes in a bid to lift her spirits. It’s she who is encouraging him, as if she knows the Herculean task he has ahead of him in trying to make sense of her. It’s a stunning reversal of roles to capture on camera, but also feels entirely appropriate for a film that has rewritten the rules of documentaries as we know them.