You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is mind-warping in a number of ways. Chief among them is its form-breaking structure, which calls into question the inherent artifice of documentary itself.
The film takes aim at a subject that ostensibly could not be more well-tread: the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose rise and fall has been chronicled in countless articles, podcasts, films, and television series. Justifiably, one might wonder what more we could possibly need to see or say about Holmes. But consider everything we know about Fielder, himself an enigmatic pop figure whose trickery, unlike that of his subject, is celebrated (and laid bare in absurdist-comic projects like Nathan For You, The Rehearsal, and The Curse). Oppenheim, meanwhile, has built a burgeoning directorial career through richly cinematic portraits of American vulgarity: Spermworld, Ren Faire, and, more recently, his narrative debut, Primetime.
What begins as a relatively straightforward glimpse into Holmes’ home life during the weeks leading up to her imprisonment shapeshifts once she begins her sentence. Reckoning with Holmes’ absence, Fielder and Oppenheim (and the other surprising collaborators they enlist) make bold choices that knowingly distort the line between reality and fiction—and forces the viewer to reconsider whether there was ever a line to begin with. By the end, once we’ve Seen Everything, we’re left questioning whether any of it was actually real or trustworthy.
This is what will keep us talking about Everything long after the initial froth of surprise guests and full-frontal nudity has subsided. The film asks us to question the machinations of narrative and authorship—not just the means by which stories are told, but the power and the motives of those involved. These themes help the film feel extremely timely, but also position Fielder and Oppenheim in a robust lineage of filmmakers that have similarly dared to deconstruct genre and form.
In keeping with Everything’s obfuscations, we’ve compiled a genre-spanning list of several other films that challenge our ideas about performance, perception, and truth.
Finding Frances (Dir. Nathan Fielder, 2017)
This may be an obvious choice for longtime Fielder fans. But for the uninitiated, the feature-length series finale of Nathan For You is a prerequisite to understanding his creative journey from deadpan prankster to performance artist-cum-investigative reporter-cum-anthropologist. Fielder facilitates and documents an elderly man’s search for his long-lost high school sweetheart, a search that takes shocking turns as Fielder uncovers murky truths about the relationship. Fielder eventually puts himself under the microscope, effectively laying the groundwork for the rabbit hole down which he’d descend in The Rehearsal. Finding Frances even features what might be the first instance of Fielder’s Rehearsal method at work, when he stages an opportunity for the film’s subject to practice reuniting with his old flame in advance of the real event. Watching it in hindsight, it feels as if you’re seeing Fielder have a real-time epiphany that would set the next decade of his career in motion.
Sherman’s March (Dir. Ross McElwee, 1986)
McElwee’s plan to shoot a documentary about Union army General William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign during the Civil War is quickly derailed when the filmmaker, reeling from a breakup, instead embarks on a meandering, navel-gazing exploration of his own romantic life and the women who captivate him. Just as Fielder frequently uses his work as a vehicle to analyze his personal relationships, McElwee scrutinizes his shortcomings even as he repeats them.
F For Fake (Dir. Orson Welles, 1973)
Welles sets the stage for his seminal docu-drama by quoting illusionist Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin: “The magician is an actor, playing the part of a magician.” From there, he spins a yarn connecting the dots between a prolific art forger, a hoax biographer, and Welles himself—questioning, throughout, the slippery parameters of authenticity and authorship. Is a lie still a lie if everyone believes it?
Medium Cool (Dir. Haskell Wexler, 1969)
The oldest film on this list by half a decade, Medium Cool sets an important precedent not only in breaking formal conventions but by raising questions about the ethics of media production. On its face, the film is a work of fiction, following Robert Forster as a steely news reporter who discovers his station is seeding information to the FBI. But filmmaker Haskell Wexler—best known as a documentarian and the Oscar-winning cinematographer of films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—integrates the reality of the times in staggering ways. In the film’s climax, the actors and crew are caught in the real-life violent protest that took place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “There are fictional characters in real situations [and] there are real characters in fictional situations,” Roger Ebert wrote in his 1969 review. “The mistake would be to separate the real things from the fictional. They are all significant in exactly the same way.”
Close-Up (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
Vanguard of Iranian cinema Abbas Kiarostami became an international sensation with the release of Close-Up, which remains the most celebrated and influential of his neorealist dramas. Using a cast comprised entirely of non-actors playing themselves, the film alternately documents and reenacts the real-life story of a cinephile whose impersonation of a well-known Iranian filmmaker lands him on trial for fraud. (It is worth noting that Kiarostami’s own artistic integrity was called into serious question in 2020, when Ten actress Mania Akbari came forward with allegations that Kiarostami plagiarized and sexually assaulted her.)
No Bears (Dir. Jafar Panahi, 2022)
Fielder and Oppenheim may be ballsy, but they’ve got nothing on Jafar Panahi, who the Iranian government has repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and formally banned from making films—which, at considerable risk, he continues to do. A protégé of Kiarostami, Panahi is similarly known for neorealist docufiction, but often plays a prominent role in the films himself. In No Bears, which was filmed in secret, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, remotely directing a docu-drama in Turkey from the other side of the border in a small Iranian village. Both the production and Panahi face troubles that, though scripted, are rooted in the grave realities of living under the government’s oppressive regime.
Dahomey (Dir. Mati Diop, 2024)
“Dramatized documentary” may be as suitable a descriptor for You Can See Everything as it is for Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which chronicles the repatriation of several ancient artifacts from a Parisian museum back to their native Benin, West Africa. Diop incorporates the real and imagined voices of art historians, Beninese university students, and even one of the artifacts themselves to create a mercurial dialogue about displacement, provenance, and ownership.
Jane B. par Agnes V. (Dir. Agnès Varda, 1988)
A very famous woman invites a quirky auteur to document her at home and dissect her public persona through a cinematic portrait. Recollections on the past and present, plus reenactments of alternate realities, ensue. Sound familiar? Fortunately, this docu-fantasy collaboration between legendary artists Jane Birkin and Agnès Varda is strictly good vibes.
Blue Heron (Dir. Sophy Romvari, 2026)
This year’s second buzziest meta-docu-auto-fiction film about the inherent limitations of both memory and cinema in availing objective truth comes from Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari (who hails from Victoria, BC, where Fielder famously graduated from business school with “really good grades.”) Romvari tells a semiautobiographical story of a filmmaker who uses her artistic practice and her family’s archives to try and comprehend the enigmatic half-brother she was too young to know before his untimely death. The film is a tender meditation on grief, memory and art, throughout which Romvari employs audacious structural and formal choices—at times fusing documentary with scripted narrative—to illustrate the futility of her protagonist’s search. It’s impossible to ever know, much less capture, a holistic truth of who someone is or was.