Nathan Fielder’s movie on Elizabeth Holmes absolutely lives up to the hype

Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Turns Access Into a Puzzle

Activelifezero.com – Elizabeth Holmes is shown preparing for prison in a way that feels almost impossible to separate from the mythology surrounding her. Before reporting to federal custody in 2023, the former Theranos founder sat for more than 200 camera poses and scans intended to preserve her likeness for future use in video, holograms and artificial intelligence.

The sequence appears in “You Can See Everything,” the secretive new documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Holmes and her partner, William “Billy” Evans, who shares two children with her, describe plans for another healthcare venture they call Theranos 2.0. A digital version of Holmes could potentially be used for presentations while she remains incarcerated.

Yet the practical business rationale is undercut by Holmes’ distress. She cries as she discusses the decision to let cameras record and replicate her image, aware of how public exposure has shaped her life.

I have a weird history with being on camera.

That uneasy admission becomes a fitting entry point for a film focused on a figure whose public image has repeatedly collided with questions of trust, performance and deception. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in connection with Theranos, the failed blood-testing company she founded. In 2022, she received a prison sentence of more than 11 years. She has been approved to move to a halfway house in 2027.

An unusually close look at a famously elusive subject

The documentary arrives with extraordinary anticipation after being kept under wraps and then unveiled through a surprise trailer. Early reactions have been emphatic, with some critics describing it as a leading film of the year and raising the possibility of a best-picture Oscar nomination for a documentary. Its theatrical release gives viewers a chance to assess whether that excitement is warranted.

What distinguishes the project is not merely its access, but the nature of that access. Fielder and Oppenheim film Holmes and the people around her during the tense period before she enters prison. The camera reaches beyond standard interview territory, observing intimate domestic moments and exposing an environment that feels at once candid and highly conscious of being watched. Even Evans is briefly seen nude in the shower.

That proximity does not produce a simple explanation of Holmes. Instead, it makes certainty harder. The film continually presses the audience to consider what is authentic, what may be rehearsed and whether those categories can ever be cleanly divided when the subject has spent years at the center of a spectacular corporate fraud case.

Fielder is particularly suited to that challenge. His earlier work, including “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” has built a distinct comic and unsettling approach around elaborate setups, social discomfort and layers of self-awareness. He often appears to be both observer and instigator: an apparently deadpan participant who creates circumstances that reveal how strange ordinary behavior can become.

In this setting, Holmes offers a subject whose self-presentation seems similarly unstable. Fielder’s involvement gives the documentary an added charge because he is acutely interested in the ways people shape reality around themselves. Holmes, meanwhile, appears to present several possible versions of her story, each demanding scrutiny.

The question at the center of the film

Evans argues that Holmes is simply unusual. Her father appears to see her as someone harmed by the men around her. Another revealing passage involving her response to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First” routine raises the possibility that she may be on the spectrum and may struggle to understand how other people receive what she says.

Those possibilities are not presented as neat answers. The documentary also confronts the more severe interpretation: that Holmes is a compulsive liar who has become convinced by her own inventions. Fielder at one point compares her to a magician and considers whether she could be among the most manipulative people ever encountered.

Holmes herself frames the problem in language that captures the film’s central tension.

The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true. So what is the reality?

The question is more complicated than a defense of Holmes or a restatement of the case against her. Her conviction and sentence establish the legal consequences of Theranos’ collapse, but the documentary appears interested in a different, more unsettling issue: how a person understands herself after the public has reached a firm conclusion about who she is.

For viewers, that distinction matters. A documentary can expose private behavior without resolving the moral meaning of what it captures. “You Can See Everything” seems designed to make its audience feel that tension rather than relieve it. The closer the filmmakers get, the less comfortable the act of looking becomes.

Artifice is part of the point

Oppenheim, whose A24 film “Primetime” was released last month, joins Fielder in making a work that embraces visual contradiction. The documentary is described as strikingly beautiful while also deliberately unflattering. Extreme close-ups emphasize skin texture, perspiration, wrinkles and blemishes, making both Holmes and Fielder look as though they are being examined through a lens rather than merely photographed.

The filmmaking machinery is also visible. Crew members and boom microphones remain in frame, refusing the polished illusion that documentaries simply capture untouched reality. That choice fits Fielder’s longstanding fascination with constructed situations. The film places its own production process beside the story it is trying to tell, blurring observation with recreation and fact with performance.

That approach may be the film’s most provocative element. Holmes’ story already contains questions about charisma, technological promises and the consequences of believing a persuasive narrative. A documentary that openly reveals its own artifice does not claim to stand outside those questions. Instead, it asks viewers to remain alert to every image, every explanation and every attempt to turn a complicated person into a final, easily understood character.