[This story contains spoilers for You Can See Everything.]
Much has been made of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s hit hybrid documentary You Can See Everything as a cutting-edge inquiry into truth, performance and authenticity. But that deserved attention, along with the dull focus on whether convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes meant to commit her crimes, may obscure the film’s grandest achievement. It’s a hall-of-fame entrant into the timeless genre of gothic romance.
That’s right: It won’t be long before YCSE is taught alongside the other shared-unreality classics like Rebecca, Persona, Gaslight, Possession, Mulholland Drive and Phantom Thread. The movie inhabits and updates the form’s conventions to offer something new.
YCSE cloisters its characters in a cramped San Diego beach house, this mundane domestic space turned into an unnerving psychological chamber through tight framing, probing questions and the around-the-clock presence of a camera crew. Holmes, at the start of filming just weeks away from actual imprisonment, herself occupies the familiar Gothic heroine role — seemingly vulnerable, possibly deceptive. Her innocent children are shown, born into a tragic tale. Then there’s her devoted, perhaps dangerous, gun-wielding partner and mirror Billy Evans. As the story unfolds, it’s unclear whether he might be exploiting her, she’s manipulating him, or they’ve arrived at a dark mutual accommodation.
The couple’s relationship appears to be an archetypal folie a deux, or madness of two. Their passions and delusions strengthen through their symbiosis. But what’s most galvanizing about YCSE is how that destabilization is enacted on its other on-screen participants, and by the end the audience itself, through the catalytic effects of its later acts.
In recent years, Fielder has sealed his reputation as a trickster-auteur with Showtime’s The Curse and HBO’s The Rehearsal. Many viewers likely arrive for an extended cage match between Holmes, the infamous con woman, and a man who first made his name, as he reminds her in the movie, hosting a comedy show about business scams. Here, Fielder is an interpreter and intruder, a suspicious confidant and agenda-driven stranger. Then there’s the late arrival of Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for portraying Holmes in Hulu’s 2022 series The Dropout. As Holmes serves time in federal prison, the actress returns as her literal double in reenactments and conversations, first haunting the San Diego beach house, then Evans’ new residence in Texas — even interacting with the couple’s kids.
Together, directly and indirectly, the quartet question each other and themselves about their motivations. Amid this intimacy, there are fundamental suspicions and self-serving justifications. There are also rivalrous power plays.
YCSE has the quality of a séance. It’s there in the spectral camerawork and score (the latter inspired by Vertigo), in Seyfried’s conjuring of Holmes, and in the set piece in which Evans turns his wife into a hologram. But maybe most of all in how the audience is made to fall into its rabbit hole, turning spectators into participants, forcing them to become complicit in the movie’s business: practical, moral, aesthetic.
A nightmare logic is at work. Fielder and Oppenheim have orchestrated an entertaining, eerie phantasmagoria in which the closer you look — the harder you think — it’s quite possible the less you will know. Sure, you can see everything. Yet you may, in the end, perceive nothing at all.