You Can See Everything, the new-ish documentary profiling Elizabeth Holmes, is one of the best half-movies of the year. Directed by the inimitable Nathan Fielder, along with Lance Oppenheim (who also made this year’s Primetime), the film starts in 2023. It covers several weeks leading up to Holmes’ incarceration following her fraud conviction over the whole Theranos debacle years earlier.
Fielder spent weeks living in the orbit of Holmes and her family. This familial unit includes her romantic and business partner Billy Evans and young child. Holmes presents herself in Everything as almost a parody of a warm, nurturing matriarch. There is barely a scene where she is not cooing or fussing over the baby. Complicating this overly rosy portrait is the fact that Holmes is pregnant with her second child despite being destined to soon begin an 11-year prison sentence.
Such a mismatch reflects the essence that is Holmes, which Fielder and Oppenheim aggressively investigate over the course of Everything’s prodigious runtime. How can one explain the chasm between the visionary front Holmes presented to the world and the destructive actions she took as the founder of Theranos? One could chalk it up to good ol’ fashioned avarice and egomania. The history of corporate America is rife with such stories. Fielder suggests as much in one scene where we meet Holmes’ father, who was the president of an Enron subsidiary.
Anyone familiar with Fielder’s work, however, knows things won’t stop there. Whether it be in his Comedy Central show, Nathan for You, or his HBO program, The Rehearsal, the filmmaker has long been preoccupied with questions of reality, identity and narrative. More specifically, how our identities are shaped and solidified through narrative, which then distorts reality and hides the truth even from ourselves.
Fielder repeatedly presses Holmes on her fraud conviction and whether she was intentionally trying to obfuscate the truth. With her giant, unblinking eyes and deranged perma-grin, Holmes remains largely inscrutable throughout these exchanges. You are unsure if she was merely trying to present herself in the best possible light or if she really did believe the bullshit she was peddling. Their scenes together are electric, surreally hilarious at times and often tremendously powerful. They raise the terrifying prospect that no one—not even yourself—can ever really be known.
Once Holmes goes to prison at around the halfway point, Fielder and Co. must expand their focus to other people in Holmes’ orbit. We get more of Billy, a truly loathsome, Charlie Kirk-loving, wannabe tech bro. Like Holmes, Billy puts on a loving, supportive boyfriend routine, but at the same time, he is capitalizing on Holmes’ notoriety to accelerate his own tech career. The film also turns inward, bringing in the always wonderful Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried played Holmes in the 2022 miniseries The Dropout and reprises the part here in several recreations where Fielder could not film Holmes in prison. While initially this feels like a tenuous connection, Seyfried allows the filmmakers to ask hard questions about film’s capacity to tell the truth due to artistic license. Not even Fielder himself is spared from Everything’s critical gaze. The film heavily implies that Fielder was taken in by Holmes, which, if true, would naturally undercut the documentary’s supposed objectivity.
All of these are relevant topics, especially in the heavily segmented, algorithmic, post-truth world in which we all have been forced to live. Yet they don’t quite equal the film’s stellar first half. In part, that’s because they feel like a retread of Fielder’s past projects. The filmmaker has become infamous for piling on multiple layers of metacommentary and creating delightfully kaleidoscopic funhouses of existentialism and navel-gazing. The film’s first half has none of that. But its stripped-down aesthetic and intimate conversations are somehow more absorbing because of Holmes’ singular presence.
No matter what is thrown at her throughout the film, Holmes’ persona almost never wavers. She comes across almost as an alien intelligence or, at the very least, as someone who has worn two faces for so long that she herself has forgotten which one is authentic.
Fielder’s efforts to uncover how aware Holmes is of her capacity for deception are where You Can See Everything is at its very best and will almost certainly be what it’s remembered for. One of the film’s primary subplots sees Fielder trying to verify a quote from Holmes about The Dropout, specifically that Seyfried was not playing her, but “a character” she created. Evans and Holmes vehemently dispute that she ever said this, and the reasons why are obvious. If true, it would undermine her argument that she wasn’t knowingly trying to mislead others as the head of Theranos. More broadly, it would sully the idea that she is, at her core, a truthful person unjustly maligned.
Everything never arrives at a definitive conclusion over this issue, but it doesn’t really have to. The points it raises in its first half about the slippery nature of human psychology and its implications are powerful and provocative enough. We see this when Holmes is departing for prison. She gets choked up while telling Evans she has pumped extra breast milk for the child who will now have to grow up without her. The scene cuts like a knife, as it feels like one of the few times that Holmes’ mask of sanity slips and reality shines through. In that moment, we realize that it doesn’t really matter whether the Holmes we see in Everything is a front or not. The destruction she is leaving in her wake is undeniably real.
