There are people whose public image ends up harder to decipher than their own story. Elizabeth Holmes is one of them. Founder of Theranos, central figure in one of Silicon Valley's most famous frauds, sentenced to eleven years in prison, Holmes has long been a character whose story seems to offer a final explanation of the gap between ambition and deception. And yet, in You Can See Everything, the documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, that gap yawns open again. Not because new details about the Theranos case necessarily emerge, but because it becomes impossible to say with certainty what we are looking at.
The film begins in 2023, a few weeks before Holmes goes to prison. It is she, together with her partner Billy Evans, who invites the two directors to document their daily life in a house on the California coast. An apparently total openness, almost a promise of transparency. The title seems to declare exactly that: there are no shadows here, everything can be seen. But in cinema, as in Holmes's public life, the show of transparency can become a particularly sophisticated form of opacity.
The question running through the documentary's nearly three hours is not only whether Holmes is lying. It is whether there is any position from which one can truly tell a lie from a conviction, strategy from sincerity, the person from the character she has built. Fielder and Oppenheim do not try to untie the problem through a traditional investigative reconstruction. They turn it into the very material of the film.
What did Elizabeth Holmes do, and why the answer is no longer enough
The Theranos story is already widely known. In 2015, journalistic investigations called into question the technological promises of the company founded by Holmes, who claimed she could run numerous medical tests using just a few drops of blood. The company had raised huge investments and built around its founder the image of an entrepreneurial genius able to revolutionise medicine. The company's subsequent collapse, the legal proceedings and Holmes's conviction have fed books, documentaries and works of fiction, including the miniseries The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried.
You Can See Everything arrives after this proliferation of accounts, when the story seems to have already found its narrative shape. This is exactly where Fielder steps in, taking the case out of the reassuring structure of the story told after the fact. Holmes's legal past is the context, but it does not exhaust the meaning of the images. In front of the camera, the protagonist is not simply the woman who deceived investors and colleagues: she is someone who keeps producing a version of herself, while a director tries to work out how far he can trust what he sees.
From Nathan for You to The Rehearsal
Fielder's method is essential to understanding this tension. With Nathan for You and above all The Rehearsal, the Canadian author developed a language in which simulating social interactions becomes a tool for exploring their contradictions. Carefully constructed situations, exaggerated behaviour and an almost unnatural impassivity lay bare how impossible it is to fully control the meaning of one's own actions. Even when everything seems set up to anticipate a reaction, something slips out of the script.
A Theranos documentary played like a game of poker
In You Can See Everything, this device meets a person whose whole public story is tied to the problem of credibility. The result is not a simple extension of Fielder's comedy into the documentary genre. It is a clash between two different ways of constructing a representation: on one side, the director who arranges the conditions of observation; on the other, the protagonist who tries to steer other people's gaze.
The long conversations between Fielder and Holmes thus gain a tension that does not depend on discovering new information. The lingering close-ups, the pauses and the expressions that are hard to read turn faces into surfaces on which the viewer looks for clues. Every hesitation seems significant, every answer may hide a second intention. Watching takes on the rhythm of a poker game in which nobody shows their cards and silence becomes part of the strategy.
Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes: the director steps into the frame
The film's most interesting choice, though, concerns its own author. Fielder had originally imagined staying behind the camera, in the seemingly neutral position of someone who gathers testimony without intervening. During filming, however, Holmes and Evans kept drawing him into the conversations. His presence gradually became part of the footage.
This shift radically changes the relationship between observer and observed. Fielder can no longer hide behind the supposed objectivity of the documentarian: his reactions, his doubts and the way he answers the protagonist's provocations enter the field of vision. The director becomes a character in turn, exposed to the same scrutiny he applies to Holmes.
It is a decisive step because it makes visible a structural contradiction of the documentary. Whoever films has the power to choose the shots, organise the edit and decide which moments will survive the recording. But this control does not guarantee that the final meaning will match the filmmaker's intentions. The subject can resist, manipulate the situation or simply behave in ways the director had not foreseen. And the director, in trying to understand the subject, inevitably ends up revealing something about himself.
Lance Oppenheim and the distance between bodies
The collaboration with Lance Oppenheim is fundamental to this balance. Already the author of documentaries attentive to the forms through which people build and inhabit their identities, Oppenheim helps give the material a precise visual and sonic organisation. The camera determines the distance from bodies, the duration of gazes and the degree of intimacy granted to the viewer.
The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the less simple it becomes to interpret them. Here, physical proximity only intensifies the doubt.
The face as a screen: why the You Can See Everything movie unsettles
There is one element that makes You Can See Everything particularly unsettling: how easily the viewer ends up attributing meanings to Holmes's expressions. Her fixed gaze, her controlled voice and the difficulty of reading her reactions seem to invite a diagnosis. But the film offers no truly reliable outside position from which to make one.
The temptation is to treat every gesture as further proof of manipulation. The Theranos story seems to authorise this reading, and yet the documentary shows how fragile the passage is from knowing the facts to interpreting a person. Knowing that Holmes was convicted of fraud does not mean being able to establish automatically what she thinks at any given moment, or what lies behind a particular expression.
The risk is that observation turns into a form of projection: the viewer believes they recognise the lie because they already know the end of the story. Every gesture is absorbed by a prior narrative, every ambiguity becomes a confirmation. In this sense, the film questions not only Holmes but also the audience and its desire for unmasking.
The protagonist's face becomes a surface on which expectations, suspicions and prejudices are reflected. Looking at her is not the same as knowing her. And the supposed transparency promised by the title proves increasingly problematic: seeing everything does not mean understanding everything.
Who controls the story?
The question extends to the relationship between Holmes and Billy Evans, whose bond runs through the film like a second enigma. Their intimacy, observed at a moment of extreme public vulnerability, can look like a testimony of affection or like an attempt to build an image different from the one settled over the years of the scandal. The documentary does not let this ambivalence be easily reduced to a single interpretation.
This is where You Can See Everything goes beyond the boundaries of the individual portrait. The Theranos story concerned a health technology whose effectiveness had been presented in deceptive terms; it also concerned the investors, the media and the institutions that had helped lend credibility to a company on the strength of its promises. Holmes had not built her image in a vacuum. Around her had formed a system of expectations, interests and endorsements that had turned ambition into authority.
The documentary moves this dynamic onto the terrain of representation. Here too there is a promise: to offer access to reality, to show what usually stays hidden. But every public account depends on a selection, a frame and someone who controls its form. The problem goes beyond simply establishing whether the subject is sincere: it includes looking for the conditions that make their version of events credible.
This is why Fielder's presence matters so much. His impassivity, the comic signature of his earlier work, takes on an ambiguous function here. It can look like a defence against attempts at manipulation, but also like a strategy that induces others to expose themselves. The director watches Holmes, Holmes watches the director, and the viewer tries to work out which of the two is steering the situation.
The editing keeps this circuit open, preventing the tension from resolving into a simple revelation. Above all, we wonder who has the power to decide which version of reality will end up prevailing.
The You Can See Everything box office surprise
The film's enthusiastic reception and its surprising success at the US box office have turned You Can See Everything into a cinematic event. But its relevance is not exhausted by the renewed interest in Elizabeth Holmes, nor by the curiosity sparked by the meeting of a controversial figure and an author known for his estranging humour.
The truth after the truth: a You Can See Everything review
The film belongs to a wider reflection on the fate of documentary in an age when the public image is constantly built, corrected and distributed. The distinction between reality and fiction does not disappear, but becomes insufficient to explain how a story is perceived. A situation can be real and, at the same time, take the form of a performance; a testimony can contain verifiable facts without exhausting the meaning of the person giving it.
Fielder and Oppenheim challenge the idea that truth can emerge automatically from privileged access to a person or from the mere accumulation of images. The documentary is not a transparent window on the world: it is a constructed work, with responsibilities, limits and blind spots.
No Elizabeth Holmes documentary spoilers, only a question
What remains, then, is a question, more uncomfortable than any verdict on Holmes's character: how far are we willing to trust whoever tells a story, and how much do we want to believe the version we are shown? The Theranos affair shows how far reputation can turn a promise into a collective certainty. You Can See Everything suggests the same mechanism can work in front of a screen too, when the viewer mistakes the feeling of having seen everything for the certainty of having understood.
The title, in the end, no longer sounds like a guarantee. It is almost a provocation. Cinema can bring us closer to a person, follow their gestures, record their words and hand back every hesitation. What it cannot do is remove the distance between what we see and what we are able to know.
It is in this distance that the film finds its most radical form: in the awareness that even the most insistent gaze can remain a prisoner of its own interpretations.