You Can See Everything Is the Year’s Most Twisted Romance

This article contains spoilers for You Can See Everything.

Something surprising happened the second time I watched You Can See Everything: I found myself falling in love with Elizabeth Holmes. The question of what it means to love Holmes—as opposed to the issue of her culpability in the $9 billion Theranos fraud, which is already a matter of settled law—is the slipperiest part of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s nearly three-hour documentary, which is shaping up to be the most unlikely box-office hit in recent memory. The movie is overtly concerned with whether Homes is knowingly lying or if she has sunk so far into her own delusion that she has begun to believe it herself. But what ultimately preoccupies Fielder, both onscreen and off, is whether it’s ever truly possible to know what’s in another person’s heart, and whether you can care for someone without fully understanding them.

You Can See Everything lies in a long line of nonfiction films, from Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason to Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, that foreground the inherent power differential between a documentary’s maker and its subjects, and whether that imbalance can ultimately produce anything with a claim on the truth. But while Fielder and Oppenheim are undoubtedly aware of their forebears, I don’t think they’re especially concerned with intellectual ideas about authenticity. Fielder in particular loves turning his audiences’ heads upside-down, shocking and bewildering them with elaborate ruses and revelations. (This is, after all, a man who learned to fly a 737 as a bit.) But the longer I’ve puzzled over and wrestled with Fielder’s work, the more I’ve been drawn toward an unexpected conclusion: For all his purposeful ambiguity and metafictional head-fakes, Fielder is ultimately entirely sincere. Things are exactly what they seem to be.

You Can See Everything splits neatly into two halves, the first dominated by Holmes’ presence, the second by her absence. As a cringe comedian, Fielder has a well-honed instinct for pinpointing and extending moments of discomfort, but in the 34 days he has with Holmes before the beginning of her 10-year prison sentence, he is rarely if ever able to knock her off her game. At one point, Holmes, who had been convicted just one year before of defrauding Theranos’ investors, tells Fielder that she’s never knowingly told a single lie. It’s not a claim any living human can plausibly make, and yet she sticks to her guns with such placid conviction that Fielder can only muster an exasperated, “Liz, what?”

Fielder and Oppenheim shot in the boxy aspect ratio of a classic Hollywood movie, and in moments like these, Holmes’ face has the luminous openness of a silent movie star’s, which is all the more extraordinary when you consider that she is lying through her teeth. The movie begins with several minutes of news footage detailing the extent of Holmes’ crimes, and yet it’s a struggle to connect the person in those images with the one we’re looking at. That’s very much by design. Just as Elizabeth Holmes once dressed the part of a Silicon Valley wunderkind, in unvarying black turtlenecks deliberately evoking Steve Jobs, now she wears the uniform of a doting mother of two young children, a cozy beige crewneck and frayed jeans—the same look she modeled for a New York Times profile intended to hard-launch her new persona.

That costume, which Holmes sports through most of You Can See Everything’s first half, is designed to radiate down-to-earth simplicity. But it also makes it easier for someone else to step into the role of Liz. Like the movie itself, Fielder seems adrift once Liz is committed to federal custody, hanging out with Holmes’ partner, Billy Evans, in Austin, Texas, where he and their children have moved to be closer to her minimum-security prison. It’s clear that Fielder intensely dislikes Evans, and by this point in the film, the audience does as well. (You can actually hear people lock into the movie during the early scene when Evans takes a bowl of raw eggs from Holmes when he gets frustrated that she’s not beating them properly.) So their relief is palpable when Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout, shows up to fill the Liz-shaped hole in the movie.

Seyfried enters You Can See Everything as a viewer, watching what seems to be the same 90-minute movie we’ve just watched on Fielder’s laptop. And she says what we’ve been dying for someone to say: Fuck this guy. (I’m paraphrasing.) Practically the first thing she says is that someone needs to break Holmes and Evans up. Her dim view of their relationship is only confirmed when she meets Evans in person, and the enmity is mutual; she rolls her enormous eyes when he reveals that he’s a fan of Charlie Kirk, and he viciously snaps that she’s just “a fucking actress.” Seyfried has been on screen since she was a teenage soap-opera star, and yet she also comes off as You Can See Everything’s least self-conscious subject, slicing through layers of hesitation and uncertainty like a high-powered laser. And yet, we have to wonder, is she really being herself, or just the best at faking it?

Seyfried becomes the vessel through which Fielder explores Holmes’ relationship with Evans, staging and re-staging the production meeting in which Evans (played by Seyfried’s Testament of Ann Lee co-star Christopher Abbott) demands a cut of the documentary’s profits in exchange for their continued preparation. In the reenactment, Billy only brings up the subject after Liz leaves the room to check on their kids, but Fielder can’t shake the nagging doubt that her convenient absence was all part of the plan. Did the two conspire so as not to tarnish Liz’s new image? Do they have, as both Holmes and Evans maintain, a kind of psychic bond that makes explicitly formulating such schemes unnecessary? Or is she really as innocent and trusting as she claims, once again in thrall to a toxic and controlling man exploiting her notoriety for his own financial gain?

In search of an answer, Fielder and Seyfried pore over a clip from the days when he was still in the presence of the real Elizabeth Holmes, laughing ruefully as she says she’s not making any money off their movie. They watch it twice, then again, but staring at her image brings them no closer to understanding. You Can See Everything is replete with moments that turn on a single word: Evans declaring that the Times must have misquoted Holmes saying, of actresses like Seyfried, “They’re playing a character I created,” when she must have said, “They’re playing a character they created”; Holmes insisting that it wasn’t inaccurate to say that Theranos’ devices “can” run hundreds of blood tests because in her mind that only meant they would one day be capable of doing so. (The jury in her criminal trial didn’t buy that one either.) Sometimes there is evidence to be studied, the way Seyfried studied footage of Holmes in order to play her; sometimes that evidence has to be manufactured, like Fielder’s final meeting with Holmes in prison, which he was not allowed to record. And in keeping with the movie’s inside-out epistemology, it’s the latter—the fake—that yields what feels closest to the truth.

In the second half of You Can See Everything, Fielder and Seyfried replay and reenact his interactions with Holmes, trying to figure out whether she was knowingly deceiving him or whether, as Evans claims, she simply “thinks differently.” This bears on Holmes’ guilt in the Theranos fraud—was it really lying if she genuinely believed the company’s machines would eventually work?—but beneath that is a question that’s more personal to Fielder: Was it all a lie? As he’s awaiting a phone call from Holmes in a New York hotel room, Fielder reveals that he’s recently been through a bad breakup, and the movie deliberately evokes the sharp pangs of doubt that arise after a romance comes to an end. Did we really love each other? Did I ever even know them? Was any of it real?

Fielder knows there’s something a little odd about his attachment to Holmes, and instead of shying away from it, the movie leans in, suggesting a furtive hint of romance between the two of them. When Fielder and Holmes are in her beachside rental, she asks him to take a dip in the ocean with her, and he demurs, saying that he’s afraid of cold water. But when he and Seyfried return to the house to reenact an interaction he and Holmes had while the cameras weren’t rolling, the movie abruptly cuts to a shot of two figures in the surf—one clearly Holmes, the other with his face turned away from the camera, far away enough that it might just be another scene of Holmes and Evans down by the water, a sight we’ve seen many times before. It’s not until the movie is almost over that we return to this moment, when Fielder and Seyfried play out the time he visited her in prison. The reenactment is nestled within multiple frames of constructed reality: We cut back and forth between Seyfried and Fielder reading through the script and the scene they’re playing out, and at one point, Fielder even pauses to rewrite a line because Seyfried points out that it makes Holmes look like a calculated manipulator. Fielder makes a hasty edit, and we see both versions of the scene—one where Holmes knew that Evans had asked for a cut of the movie’s profits, one where she is only ambiguously informed. But Seyfried calls him out for changing the line not because one version is closer to the truth, but because Fielder doesn’t like how the version where Holmes knowingly deceived him feels. He’s lying to us, and to himself, she suggests, because he’s protecting someone he’s come to care about. And that’s when the movie returns to the shot of two people in the ocean, and we can clearly, or almost clearly, see that the man playfully cavorting beside Holmes is Fielder.

At this point in the movie, we’ve been taught to question everything we see, and the moment is doubly ambiguous because even the firelit room where Fielder and Seyfried are running through their lines feels like a set, and their conversation itself feels like it might have been scripted. When Fielder visits Seyfried at her upstate New York farm to ask her to take part in the reenactment, Ari Balouzian’s score—a key element in keying viewers into the movie’s layers of strangeness and unease—knowingly evokes the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a movie about a man so obsessed with a fantasy of a woman he can’t have that he coaxes a different woman to become her near-identical replacement. It’s one of Hitchcock’s most personal movies, but also one of his creepiest, close to a confession of how he used the power of a movie director to compel actresses to conform to his desires. But when Fielder does it, he discovers something we don’t expect, and may not even want to accept. As flawed and reprehensible as they might be, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans might be a perfect match.

For me, the most moving moment in You Can See Everything comes in that final reenactment, when Holmes is describing how connected she feels to Evans. “Even when I’m in my cell alone, I feel him with me and we don’t even need to speak,” she says. “And that’s how I talk to him. I have conversations with him in my head, and I know what he’s feeling and what he would say.” It’s an echo of something Evans says earlier in the film, about how he feels comfortable acting on her behalf without consulting her because he always knows what she’s thinking. When Evans says it, it comes off as delusion and self-justifying, in part because it’s framed through Seyfried’s absolute horror that Holmes would hand complete control of her life to a narcissistic monster. And yet there’s no hint of that hesitation when Seyfried recites that speech as Holmes. She gives her all to it as an actress, and she sells it in way that even Holmes herself might not be able to pull off.

The first time Seyfried and Fielder replay one of his conversations with Holmes, it’s in the beach house, where Fielder tells a story about the magician David Blaine. Blaine, Fielder tells Seyfried-as-Holmes, has a trick where he sticks an ice pick through his hand—except that Blaine has, somehow, contrived to actually bore a small hole through his own palm, so when you see him piercing through his own flesh, that’s exactly what’s happening. You assume it must be a trick, but the real trick is that there isn’t one. Your eyes are telling you the truth, but your mind tells you they must be lying. You really can see everything. You just have to believe it.

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