Elizabeth Holmes documentary peels back the layers in a search for elusive truth
You Can See Everything
Starring Elizabeth Holmes & Nathan Fielder
Rated R
Directed by Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim
In theaters Friday, Oct. 16
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the debunked blood-testing-tech company Theranos, is currently serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors of mega-millions. Nathan Fielder is an actor and filmmaker best known for his docu-comedy prank-reality shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal.
Before she went away to prison in 2023, Holmes invited Fielder into her family for almost a month to make a documentary, ostensibly to show her side of the story and reveal that she had no secrets, nothing to hide about herself or her company.
“You can see everything,” she tells Fielder at one point, before heading down to the beach to frolic in the surf with her partner (and later husband) Billy Evans and their two young children.
With Theranos, Holmes claimed to have invented a new kind of technology that would revolutionize and simplify blood testing for all kinds of diseases and maladies. Only it didn’t, and she was charged—and convicted—of bilking investors after she’d become America’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire.
Fielder’s documentary, which clocks in at just under three hours, is a mesmerizing curiosity that blurs the lines between reality, fabrication and performance art. Fielder becomes an integral part of picture, a character in the real-life drama, asking probing questions, listening in on conversations and watching from the sidelines. We only get a glimpse of his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, whose recent film Primetime featured Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator vigilante Chris Hansen.
At the midpoint of the movie, actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, enters the picture to “stage” additional scenes and help steer the project once Holmes has been sent to prison and unavailable for interviews. She’s once again “playing” Elizabeth.
But is Elizabeth also playing Elizabeth? There’s a lot of attention given to a New York Times profile in which Holmes supposedly said that portrayals of her—like Seyfried in The Dropout—are fabrications, not really her. “They’re playing a character I created,” she’s quoted as saying. Holmes insists didn’t say it—and that she has proof, recordings of the interview. But despite Fielder’s prodding, those recordings never show up.
Is Holmes a manipulator, or is she being manipulated? Is she playing a character, one she created? She tells Fielder that she’s never knowingly told a lie, that she never defrauded anyone. Is she telling the truth? Does she even know what the truth is? In scene after scene, Fielder asks questions and Holmes stares at him, unblinking and grinning, nodding like a bobblehead. It seems fake, an emotionless, rictus-like mask projecting warmth, openness and innocence. But masks always hide something. What is she hiding?
“She just sees things differently,” Evans offers, not quite as insightfully as he might have intended.
The documentary becomes a real-life psychodrama, with a soundtrack that sometimes sounds like what you might hear in a suspenseful horror movie, full of tension and tautness.
Fielder, above, uncovers a murky history of questionable alliances and relationships, like Holmes’ former boyfriend, Theranos cofounder Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the much older Pakistani businessman—a sugar daddy?—who was also convicted of fraud. Evans also comes off as creepy, insisting to be paid for making the documentary, volunteering that he hacked into Holmes’ Twitter account to impersonate her, creating an AI version of Holmes that he says will be free for anyone to use, even to make pornography. He also admits that he’s out for revenge, and he’s going to “f*uck ‘em all.” Early in the film, we watch him take over in kitchen, unhappy with the way Elizabeth is scrambling the eggs. In a detail that’s more telling than Evans probably realizes, we see his house pets, snakes and lizards, slithering across the floor.
Evans and Holmes both admit they’re anxious to rise from the ashes, to “put the band back together again” and mount an even more monumental return of Theranos, a 2.0 version with new medical tech involving lasers. They insist they’re deeply in love, life mates meant for each other.
There’s an air of ick, of toxicity, of something being “off,” of closely guarded secrets and misdirection, of grandiose greed and ambition colliding with truth and consequences, of refusals to accept reality. The film peels back the layers of an onion only to find more layers. It exposes even more questions than answers.
At one point, Holmes and Fielder have a dinner-table discussion about magicians, like David Blaine, who can make you believe the unbelievable, that what you’re seeing is what there is. But it turns out it’s all trickery, masterstrokes of performance, magnificent manipulations.
Like the manipulations we see in the riveting, almost hypnotically spellbinding You Can See Everything. We may be seeing everything we can see. But what can’t we see? What’s behind the mask? And can we believe any of it?
-—Neil Pond