‘You Can See Everything’ review: Wild Elizabeth Holmes doc is one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen

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Movies don’t come much wilder than “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s brilliant, up-close-and-personal documentary about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes that’s already the talker of the year.

The Theranos founder with a husky voice and giant freaky eyes out of a Walter Keane painting has endlessly fascinated the world since her story was dramatized on the 2022 series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried. 

After that hit — a hit-job in her estimation — Holmes became a party impression, a Halloween costume, an “SNL” joke and a dinner table topic. Whatever she is, most rational people believe that what she did — misleading the public and deep-pocketed investors that her “revolutionary” blood-testing device actually worked — was wrong.

But not off-her-rocker Holmes and her equally delusional and sometimes downright villainous fiancé, Billy Evans, who we meet in this truly shocking and invasive film. This cuckoo couple’s credo is: innocent until well after proven guilty. Holmes, they say, is merely the victim of the court of public opinion.

“Liz has been turned into this monster because nobody knows who she is,” Evans, lovable as a garden snake, says. Seizing a popular, touchy-feely word, he insists his betrothed has been “othered.” 

So, he and Holmes invite oddball comedian Nathan Fielder of all people into their beach house rental in San Diego, Calif., to document the 34 days before she begins her 11-year prison sentence in Bryan, Texas. Well, that bizarre choice has backfired for them, but it’s a seismically entertaining coup for us. Watching “You Can See Everything” is like being on Willy Wonka’s messed-up boat for three unbelievable hours.

If the pair’s aim was to show that Holmes is perfectly normal, um, whoops! Over and over she stares frighteningly into the distance as if about to say, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” Occasionally a single tear cascades down her cheek as in the recent horror flick “Other Mommy.” Sorry “Othered Mommy.”  And while they do get the “human story” they hoped awkward, uncomfortable Fielder would deliver, he’s a rather deft and dogged interviewer with a truffle hound’s nose for a story.

“Have you ever lied in your life?,” he smartly asks her.

Holmes, less of a human than “E.T.,” replies, “I don’t think so.”

Yeah, OK! 

Fielder and Oppenheim’s sometimes funny, frequently chilling, visually stunning flick is unusual, to say the least. This is not a doc of straightforward revelations such as those of “The Jinx.” Nor is it a clear rundown of events, like the Holmes movie “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” was. This is an intrusive character study that, in a stimulating and riveting way, muddies the situation even more.

We start to wonder: Has Holmes repeatedly fallen prey to bad men who take advantage of her charm, such as her ex-boyfriend and Theranos co-founder Sunny Balwani and, cough cough, others? Are her actions really their fault? Or does she gravitate toward those kinds of guys so they can act as an easy shield for her shrewd manipulations? Is she a nice girl led astray or a criminal mastermind?

We’re even more mixed up as the camera’s focus goes to her adorable little children, a baby and a toddler. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for a young mother, or at least the kids who are about to be separated from her for more than a decade.

If you know anything about prison, you know you can’t just take documentary cameras through the metal detector during visiting hours. So, once Holmes goes to the clink, Fielder and Oppenheim must get creative for the second half — resulting in some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Using transcripts from notes and memories, Fielder takes the old workhorse of documentary reenactments and gives it a novel twist. But what starts out as just a clever and fun idea warps into a dark, meta experiment that verges on a psychological thriller. If we were already questioning what’s real and what isn’t, it’s here when our brains explode and pool on the floor with the popcorn kernels and scattered Nerds.

Most of Fielder’s time is spent from here on out with Evans, who we never like. But midway through, we begin to positively loathe him. The man, who’s mystifyingly working to exhume Theranos from the start-up cemetery, is soon to be the planet’s jackass du jour. A flagrant narcissist, he asks the camera crew to come film him working out at the gym. And, lending credence to the title, at one point we watch him taking a shower totally naked with full-frontal. But he’s also slimy with his partner. 

As Holmes is beating eggs, he snatches the bowl away because he doesn’t like her whisking technique. When Fielder presses her on her shady verbiage — that her machine “can” perform hundreds of blood tests, as opposed to “is capable of” doing so with the right chemistry advancements — Evans condescendingly jumps in to say, “You were communicating very clearly in your mind.” 

But Fielder even calls our antipathy toward Evans into question. Fans of reality TV know that a season’s hero and the baddie can be determined, or at least amplified, in the editing room. And at the end of “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Oppenheim suggest that perhaps our trusty interviewer liked one of these two more than the other, and that preference seeped into his subconscious. 

Ding! Isn’t that exactly how this bewitching and fascinating woman became the youngest-ever self-made billionaire in the first place?

The ultimate takeaway of this absolutely sensational, reality-bending, unmissable documentary? With Elizabeth Holmes, we will never see everything.