Published Oct. 20, 2026, 8:00 a.m. ET
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Warning: The following contains extensive You Can See Everything spoilers. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want to know about a major mid-movie turn, navigate elsewhere on Decider. We’ve got plenty of great stuff for you to read!
It’s one of the biggest box office stories of the year: an A24 documentary that no one knew existed as recently as a couple of months ago has just posted one of the biggest openings ever, both for a non-music doc, and for a movie opening under 1,000 screens. Nathan Field and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything has made itself known as a cultural phenomenon.
Like the reigning champ of non-musical docs, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, You Can See Everything has been sold on the collision between a fairly well-known (if somewhat niche) comic personality — in place of Moore, it’s Nathan Fielder, of the prank-ish comedy-reality series Nathan For You and The Rehearsal — and a figure of real-life notoriety, in this case disgraced tech founder Elizabeth Holmes. And unlike Moore’s profiling of George W. Bush in Fahrenheit, which obviously doesn’t include a sit-down interview, Fielder gets extensive face time with Holmes herself in the film.
In fact, Fielder spends weeks on end with Holmes and her family as she prepares to report for an 11-year prison sentence. If you don’t remember the news from some years back, Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors with promises of a small, breadbox-sized device that can run hundreds of medical tests on a single drop of blood. She was the subject of multiple books and articles as well as the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, which fictionalized and dramatized her rise and fall. She has remained silent for years, but was apparently open to speak to Fielder at length. These conversations and his constant presence result in scenes of disquieting intimacy.
The close-up view of an unusual pairing, along with the flabbergasted reviews out of several fall festivals, seems to be why audiences are showing up in huge numbers for the film. Yet there’s a third major figure in You Can See Everything who’s been intentionally left out of the advertising and urged to go unmentioned in early reviews. This person’s mere presence counts as a major spoiler. It’s a substantial appearance that throws the movie off any expected trajectory and into a different realm entirely. And we’re about to talk about it here, so if you want to experience it fresh, this is your last chance to turn back.
So, around halfway through the 174-minute You Can See Everything, Holmes does indeed head to federal prison, and then the movie jumps forward two years. Access to Holmes has been severely limited both by her incarceration, and her strangely relationship with her husband Billy Evans, who seems increasingly controlling and off-reservation as the film goes on. (He gives off radicalized tech-bro vibes: Relocating to Texas, arming himself, expressing paranoia about unseen and unspecified enemies.)
To fill some of the gaps where scenes with Holmes cannot be filmed, Fielder calls in Amanda Seyfried, who played a version of Holmes in The Dropout (which Fielder shows to Holmes earlier in the film). Initially, Seyfried is just there to look at footage shot for the film so far and offer some thoughts. But when she idly mentions that she’s fantasized about playing Holmes again after her prison sentence, Fielder springs into action. Soon, Seyfried’s doing full scenes as Holmes, using transcripts, or, in some cases, Fielder’s recollections (where transcripts can’t be maintained), to depict conversations that haven’t been filmed.
Obviously, this adds another layer of reality-warping meta-text to the film, which already delves into the strange pathologies of Elizabeth Holmes, who firmly (if nonsensically) insists that she did nothing wrong — even that her device does work, quibbling over the “communication” details of how she described its supposed success. (It’s a weird quasi-positive inversion of the fictional Mark Zuckerberg saying “If you were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook”; she’s basically claiming that if a bunch of components of the machine can be made to function, then so will the machine – even though those components do not currently function as they’d need to. In other words: If she’s the inventor of the Theranos machine, then it will eventually work.) By having Seyfried reprise “her” version of Holmes, the movie further blurs the lines between empathy, performance, and outright scamming.
What’s interesting about Seyfried’s appearance here — which some have touted for an Oscar nomination on the basis of the scenes where she plays Holmes — is that she comes across unequivocally great, not just as a performer but as a person. This is notable because You Can See Everything does not seem designed to burnish anyone’s reputation. The movie toys with our sympathies toward Holmes, who seems genuinely heartbroken about leaving her two very young children for extended periods. But she’s also portrayed as fundamentally unknowable and probably, on some level, deceitful, whether she intends to be or not.
Billy Evans, Holmes’s husband, seems worse across the board. Even Fielder knowingly allows himself to appear strange and sometimes befuddled; as much as he offers a voice of reason when Holmes makes absurd claims (like never having knowingly lied in her adult life), he’s also intentionally awkward and sometimes a frustratingly drawn-out interviewer. There are scenes where he has about two minutes flat to ask Holmes a question, and can’t quite spit it out in time because of the polite friendliness, even tenderness, that they maintain.
Seyfried, however, is clear-spoken, intelligent, curious, and expressive. She expresses empathy toward what Holmes is going through while maintaining skepticism about her subject’s claims that the world (including the Hulu miniseries) is wronging or maligning her. She appears down-to-earth, tending to horses at her home, and funny. When she finds herself in the awkward position of interacting with Billy Evans, who makes it more awkward by bringing up her supposed social-media gaffe of calling Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric “hateful,” she stands her ground, firmly and admirably.
If you could say anything negative about Seyfried’s persona here, it’s perhaps that she has an actor’s willingness to return to a role that, it could be argued, belongs less to her than she may assume. Even there, though, she expresses some hesitancy and misgivings while giving herself over to Fielder’s project. All in all, she seems levelheaded and delightful; a great hang whose priceless range of expressions stand in contrast to the sometimes-frozen visage of a smiling-yet-tearful Holmes. Seyfried also appreciably livens up a movie that I felt started to repeat itself, and sink into a morass of Holmes obfuscations, during its intriguing but overlong first half.
Yet You Can See Everything also builds in a suspicion over the mere fact that Seyfried comes out of it looking pretty great. Is she actually the normal person in the room, or does it behoove the filmmakers to portray her that way, to secure her participation? Even if they’re not flattering her through editing, perhaps her showbiz savvy gives her an advantage over Holmes, who seems genuinely unaware of Fielder or of comedy in general, as evidenced in an already-famous scene where she seems to not understand the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” routine. In a way, her presence threatens to undermine interpretations of the film as an expression of people’s ultimate opacity, because Seyfried doesn’t seem especially unknowable here. That a famous person who makes her living on a form of benign deception appears so well-adjusted only underlines Holmes’ pathology, rather than universalizing it.
That may be the point (or at least, those interpretations of Holmes as a stand-in for unknowability may not be what the film really has in mind). But in a movie that’s at least in part about manipulation, it’s impossible not to wonder whether Seyfried is benefiting overmuch from the movie’s other concerns, which give her the room to appear as both a performer with killer instincts (the way she adopts Holmes’ mannerisms without resorting to caricature can be eye-popping) and an after-hours human being. Yet that wondering also feels lopsided, because Seyfried has not, as far as we know, ever defrauded investors with false promises of a medical-tech miracle.
Seyfried’s total lack of presence in the film’s marketing, then, becomes more than spoiler protection. It’s almost like a photo negative of the modern publicity blitz that has stars like Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson sitting for joint interviews, playing whimsical games, and doing all manner of talk-show stunts designed to make them seem fun and relatable as they go through the business of selling their movie where they play entirely different characters from themselves. In You Can See Everything, it almost feels like we’re watching Seyfried on a press tour during the movie — not because she seems phony, but because some of us have been trained to distrust that kind of easy likability. Certainly, the movie she’s appearing in makes a case against taking people at their word.
Maybe Seyfried has too much confidence in her stardom, or simply herself, to worry about whether she seems genuine. Or maybe she understands that performance is a way of accessing truth. It’s just that some of us are better actors than others.