You Can See Everything Review: Looking the Wrong Way

This is not a film about Theranos.

It’s barely even a film about Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster currently jailed in Federal Prison Camp, Bryan and headed next fall to a halfway home just outside of Austin.

It is instead a documentary about Nathan Fielder’s relationship with subjectivity. At least, half of You Can See Everything is.

The first half appears to be a highly unconventional portrait of Holmes, the medical tech billionaire whose diagnostic black box turned out to be vaporware. In 2023, 34 days before Holmes was to surrender herself to serve her sentence, Nathan for You and The Rehearsal star Fielder moved in with her, her partner, Billy Evans, and their two kids, and shared their Airbnb on the California coast. In this peculiar domestic arrangement, Fielder follows the path of Nick Broomfield’s revolutionary 1991 examination of apartheid-era South Africa, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife. Like Broomfield, Fielder increasingly ignores his supposed central subject and focuses his attention instead elsewhere.

That takes effort, since Holmes is fascinating. Yet much as she dominated headlines in her meteoric rise and fall from being tech’s first woman billionaire, there’s little doubt that there’s something profoundly off about her. Her behavior, her seeming naivete and lack of intellectual curiosity, and that unblinking stare will launch endless post-screening diagnoses. But Evans is no peach either, his protectiveness of Holmes lurching into controlling mania, constantly trying to divert Fielder and Holmes with fruit slices. 

That 34-day countdown clock runs out by about halfway through the narrative, at which point it stops being a Broomfieldian lesson in immersion and becomes Orson Welles’ F for Fake. Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim (who recently dismantled another near-mythical media figure in Primetime) spend that opening film establishing everything they then demolish. It really helps to think of You Can See Everything as two films, since Fielder screens what seems to be a completed and edited cut of that opening hour and a half to a character who becomes as important as Holmes in the second film. It’s deconstructionist documentary filmmaking, owing more to Jacques Derrida than Errol Morris. 

Fielder and Oppenheim do everything they can to remind you this is a documentary, up to and including a seemingly deliberate excess of shots where the boom mic dips into frame. As the onscreen interviewer, Fielder plays the role of director as comic relief, but as his relationship with Holmes deepens, she slips out of focus. Meanwhile, he and Evans become more openly combative, culminating in a showdown in the WeWork building in South Austin. 

This phase of the story is where Fielder abandons any sense of journalistic distance, instead exposing and critiquing his own processes and the myth building around depicting real events. The Dropout, Hulu’s drama series about Holmes, goes from a background note to a major component, before finally becoming interwoven as he uses its fictions to question his own narrative shortcuts. While he gestures toward his own culpability, Fielder never truly interrogates his own attitude toward Holmes to any conclusion, and a weirdly paternalistic twist to her depiction means he never even glances at why she, out of all the tech crooks, is the one that got the headlines and the sentence. 

Moreover, neither he nor Oppenheim ever really face any consequences for a massive breach of documentary ethics that they treat as a subplot. That’s a moment that inadvertently highlights that old dilemma, that having an outsider like Fielder make documentaries allows them to break through conventions, but also lets them make basic but serious mistakes. Yet, in interrogating their own fraught relationships with that age-old question of “what is truth?” Fielder and Oppenheim still undeniably and unsettlingly force us to examine our own preconceptions and firm belief in our ability to discern the subjective and the objective.

You Can See Everything

2026, R, 174 min. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Find movie times.

The post You Can See Everything Review: Looking the Wrong Way appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.