Movie Review: You Can See Everything

Early on in Joshua Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes, the now-defamed founder of the company Theranos who was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, and her partner Billy Evans are reading a profile the New York Times did on Holmes. In the profile, there is a quote from Holmes pertaining to Amanda Seyfried playing her in the Hulu show The Dropout. The quote reads,

“They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

Holmes and Evans believe the quote is incorrect. They think Holmes actually said, “…playing a character they created.” While adamant about the misquote and claiming that they have a recording of the correct quote (they never find the recording, if it even existed), this quote is the lingering question throughout the film: is Elizabeth Holmes a created character?

Doing your homework on Elizabeth Holmes will help elevate the experience of watching You Can See Everything. A simple Wikipedia search will do just fine, but for the real Holmes experience, watch Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which traces Holmes’ rise as a Silicon Valley wunderkind to her catastrophic collapse with Theranos. It is a perfect companion documentary for this film and gives you a great sense of who Holmes was during the Theranos days and a groundwork of who she is today.

A still from Joshua Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder's You Can See Everything — A still from Joshua Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything (A24)

No matter how much you know about Holmes and Theranos, nothing prepares you for what happens in You Can See Everything. It is a dizzying, uncomfortable, funny, and shocking documentary that gets stranger the more it goes on.

The first two acts of the film find Fielder living in Holmes and Evans’ home a month before Holmes is scheduled to be sent to prison. Fielder has the house bugged with microphones and several cameras placed in every corner, trying his best to not miss a single moment with this family. Fielder lingers around the house, asking questions and pushing the buttons of Holmes and Evans, trying to understand who this person and this family are. Are they con artists? Or was Theranos a genuine attempt to change the healthcare industry forever? I found these two acts of the film fascinating, visually stunning (the cinematography should be given awards consideration), and surprisingly moving. We learn a lot about the dynamic between Holmes and Evans, learn more about Evans’ personality, which is a whole ordeal unto itself, and watch the Holmes family try to be as normal as possible despite living the most extraordinary life imaginable. While there are moments of genuine disgust, hilarity, and awkwardness that had me squirming in my chair, what hit me the hardest was watching a person count down the days until they went to prison. There are moments when the always confident Holmes breaks down crying, realizing her time with her family is coming to a close. I never thought I would feel sympathy towards Holmes, but Oppenheim and Fielder capturing these moments of raw emotion were powerful, and a reminder of the humanity within the often-robotic Holmes.

The third act, after Holmes goes to prison, is where the film goes off the rails and flies into a different stratosphere. Oppenheim and Fielder not only take the documentary focus in another direction but bend the rules of documentary filmmaking to create a masterful cinematic hybrid that elevates the film to one of the wildest documentaries of the decade. I will refrain from telling you anything about what happens in the last hour, so as not to spoil the movie. But trust me when I say you won’t see it coming, and you won’t believe what you are seeing. From a filmmaking perspective, it features one of the boldest and most ingenious decisions I have seen in a documentary this century. From a story perspective, what was once a portrait of a woman counting down her days until prison flips into a mystery about control and character. I spent the final stretch in genuine disbelief as the film reached its conclusion.

Fielder asks a lot of questions in You Can See Everything. But the more questions he asks, the more confusing everything gets, and then newer, more complicated questions come up. In a film that is trying to figure out who one of the biggest fraudsters of the 2000s is, I don’t know if anything got answered the way Fielder and Oppenheim expected, even if you do see almost everything. You Can See Everything is a gripping, frustrating, uncomfortable movie unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

TL;DR Review of You Can See Everything