It Had the Buzziest Premiere of the Year, but the Most Astounding Twist Has Been Saved Until Now

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The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, was often asked during his long career how he knew what he was capturing was really the truth. His answer was always the same. People can pretend to be something they’re not, but most people aren’t very good actors, and even those inclined to put on a façade can only keep it up for so long. Stick around long enough, and they’ll reveal who they really are.

At nearly three hours long, You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s mind-bending Möbius-strip portrait of former Silicon Valley wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes, puts that adage to the test. Beginning 34 days before Holmes is set to be jailed for defrauding investors in her company, Theranos, the movie gives the impression of spending practically every waking moment with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two young children (showers and breastfeeding notwithstanding). And yet we often find ourselves, like Fielder, gazing into Holmes’ wide, ice-blue eyes, and wondering: Who the hell is she?

Even in a world full of high-tech flimflam artists, Holmes remains a figure of special fascination, not for the complexity of her scam but for the ease with which others, including investors and major media outlets, fell for it, and the apparent guilelessness with which she insists she never did anything wrong. Although he initially planned to stay behind the camera, Fielder finds himself increasingly drawn into the frame so he can confront his subject face to face. A trailer featuring one such standoff caused a sensation when it was released on the same night as the movie’s top-secret premiere, and the anticipation has only built since. Even in a terrible market for theatrical nonfiction, You Can See Everything is selling out opening-weekend screenings at multiplexes where the only three-hour documentaries tend to star Taylor Swift. It’s a genuine phenomenon, which is only going to make it more interesting when a mainstream audience collides with the epistemological trapdoors of Fielder’s cult TV shows, and with a subject who insists that “there’s a reality about me that isn’t true.”

Holmes is, as Evans admits, “most famous for lying.” Theranos, which professed to be developing a revolutionary new technology that would allow multiple lifesaving tests to be run on just a few drops of blood, turned out to be an enormous scam, but not before Holmes was crowned the female Steve Jobs, the CEO of a startup valued at $9 billion despite the fact that the company’s machines never functioned as advertised. Even in an industry where wild claims abound, it’s hard to imagine how prominent investors like Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch could be so easily hoodwinked, but the various accounts of Holmes’ misdeeds, including John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood and Elizabeth Meriwether’s miniseries The Dropout, conclude that they believed in her because she looked the part. With her black turtleneck sweaters and artfully mussed hair, Holmes cultivated the image of a genius too preoccupied with changing the world to waste mental energy on something as mundane as looking in the mirror. (Her bright-red lips and dark eyeshadow told a different story, but perhaps male investors didn’t notice that part.) In The Dropout, Amanda Seyfried played Holmes as a woman so intoxicated by visions of her own success that she eventually succumbed to her own spell. But as Holmes told the New York Times in May 2023, of people like Seyfried, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

That quote, published while Fielder and Oppenheim were in the middle of filming, becomes an immediate bone of contention. Evans immediately suggests that Holmes was misquoted, that she didn’t and never would say something like that. (The Times stands by its reporter.) But what freaks him out isn’t the possibility that the quote is inaccurate; it’s that Holmes might have told the truth. In one particularly intense exchange, Fielder presses Holmes on her assertion that she’s “never tried to deceive anyone.” You’ve never told one lie? an incredulous Fielder asks. Ever? “I’ve always tried to say what I believe,” she responds. “That’s how I’ve built my whole life.”

There’s no question that Holmes knew that Theranos’ devices didn’t work as purported, that even after they were deployed to pharmacies, the company was secretly using other companies’ machines to test their samples. (In the film, she maintains that she defrauded investors but not patients; in other words, she did only what she was convicted of.) But what she believed is a different story, or at least she would prefer it to be. Those who’ve read the Times story that so riles Evans will recall it as a sly deconstruction of Holmes’ attempt to reset her public persona before she heads to prison. Now, we’re told, she’s a “devoted” mom of two, no longer Elizabeth but Liz, and the accompanying photos show her in a soft camel-colored sweater, face scrubbed of all but the most basic makeup. It’s the same look she sports for You Can See Everything, which must have been intended as part of the same rebranding tour.

Exactly why Holmes and Evans settled on Fielder and Oppenheim as the ones to rehabilitate her rep is an open question. After a screening at the New York Film Festival, the filmmakers said that word had been circulating in the industry that Holmes was looking for someone to document her life, and perhaps Fielder’s HBO pedigree and an association with A24 was enough to make them seem respectable. (Fielder did, after all, graduate from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades.) But Fielder’s previous work, which then included Nathan for You and the first season of The Rehearsal, hardly made him an obvious choice for a soft-soap vanity production. Even he seems baffled that Holmes gave him so much access. At one point, he asks her straight out: “Why me?”

Holmes’ involvement is likely to draw audiences unfamiliar with Fielder’s game. (The movie’s marketing is built around unnervingly tight close-ups of her eyes.) But for Fielderphiles, there’s a kind of poetic justice in seeing him be the one who is constantly struggling to figure out what is real. Fielder is a master of the deadpan prank, whether it’s taking advantage of fair-use statutes to open a mock Starbucks or producing stylish outerwear that benefits Holocaust education, heightening a natural affectlessness that has led some to theorize he may be on the autism spectrum. But in Holmes, he more than meets his match, scrutinizing her blankly open face for any sign that she knows she’s lying through her teeth. At one point, an exasperated Fielder plays Holmes a clip of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” to give her a sense of what it feels like trying to break through her apparent inability to confront or even comprehend her crimes. But Holmes seems genuinely unable to grasp the premise of an 80-year-old comedy routine. “Do you understand why that’s funny?” Fielder asks her. “I don’t know,” she replies. “They couldn’t understand each other?”

Evans, who often acts as Holmes’ self-appointed protector, tells Fielder that she “just thinks differently”—and, he explains later, Fielder does too, which is why Fielder thinks they chose him in the first place. But Fielder also suspects that he was an attractive choice because he doesn’t have the science background to challenge Holmes on the boasts she made about Theranos, or about the new, suspiciously similar-sounding company she and Evans are currently raising money for. But when he raises that idea with her directly, she abruptly starts tearing up and talking about how much she loves her family. “Either this is fully sincere,” Fielder tells one of his collaborators, “or she honestly might be the most manipulative person that’s ever lived.”

Fielder and Oppenheim have asked audiences at early screenings to keep that collaborator’s identity a secret, and although one major review spilled the beans a few hours after the premiere, critics have largely followed suit. But considering that the collaborator essentially takes over the second half of the movie—which is to my mind, its strongest and most jaw-dropping part—consider this your warning that this article contains spoilers for You Can See Everything. As the clock on Holmes’ availability ticks down, Fielder grows more insistent in his attempts to break through her shell, and to determine whether there’s anything inside it. But he hits a brick wall when she goes to prison, unable to get her on camera or speak at length, and without Holmes in the picture, Evans grows increasingly combative and opportunistic. So when poring over his footage yields no further insights, Fielder turns to the one person who’s spent as much time pondering Holmes’ self-presentation as closely as he has: Amanda Seyfried, who played her in The Dropout.

Seyfried doesn’t play Holmes, exactly, but she does take her place as Fielder’s onscreen sounding board. She also brings the movie a much-needed energy, a jolt of directness that slices through its layers of hesitation and doubt. Fielder spends the better part of two hours puzzling over just what Evans’ deal is, but Seyfried immediately pegs him as an exploitative narcissist, prompting a face-to-face confrontation that moved my audience to explosive applause. (Having been in an industry that preys on vulnerable people since she was a teenager, Seyfried, one rather expects, knows the type.) It’s an astonishing performance, complicated by the fact that at this point in the film, we no longer have any idea what’s for real and what’s a setup.

Holmes, however, remains an enigma, and a source of nagging guilt. She’s a convicted criminal, an emblem of a culture that lionizes whiz-kid sociopaths and wild promises, their stature inflated by investors with the knowledge and power to get out just before the bubble bursts. (Any resemblance to the A.I. boom is completely coincidental.) And yet it’s possible, or at least seems so, that she’s a casualty of that culture as well. Seyfried defends her participation in The Dropout, even when Fielder shows her footage of Holmes being reduced to tears while finally watching it, or alleging that she receives worse treatment in prison because the guards and her fellow inmates only know the fictionalized version of her. But you can feel the uncertainty creep in around the edges, the feeling that there might be something a little unsavory about reducing a person’s life to an easily consumed narrative—or, indeed, in consuming it.

Fielder lives in that uncertainty, and loves it. He declines to answer questions about which parts of his work are real and which are constructed, and locks his collaborators down with nondisclosure agreements lest they be tempted to betray his secrets. (Seyfried has thus far steered clear of the movie’s Q&As and used her Instagram to post pictures from Europe on the days it’s been screened.) But one thing I’ve grown certain of is that he loves highlighting his own culpability. He’s been invited into Holmes and Evans’ beachfront rental, but he shows himself peeking out from behind curtains and lurking in the corner of their bedroom like he’s a ghost they have yet to exorcise. Fielder wants his audience to feel uneasy, to question whether they’ve been unknowingly roped into something unethical or duplicitous, and to walk away wondering why we don’t ask ourselves that question all the time. You never know if Holmes is playing Fielder or Fielder’s playing you, if you’re in on the joke or you’re a part of it—and perhaps you never will.