You Can See Everything begins with a premise that sounds like a pitch someone would make as a joke: Elizabeth Holmes, convicted fraudster and Theranos founder, awaiting an 11-year prison sentence, hires Nathan Fielder — the comedian most famous for elaborate business cons — to make a documentary clearing her name. The joke, it turns out, is load-bearing. Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim didn't stumble into this. Holmes and her husband Billy Evans sought out a film crew in 2023, and for reasons the film eventually interrogates with some force, they chose Oppenheim, whose hyper-saturated tight-frame style specializes in making the mundane look faintly sinister, and Fielder, whose entire public persona is built on the kind of deadpan sociopathy that makes interview subjects say things they immediately regret. It is, as Fielder himself points out on camera in one of several blunt confrontations, an extraordinarily odd choice for someone trying to rehabilitate a fraud conviction. Oppenheim's visual signature — creeping zooms that bore into faces with uncomfortable precision — is not incidental to what You Can See Everything achieves. Scenes that could read as domestic portraiture instead become a forensic parade of inscrutable motivations. Holmes projects guileless warmth. Fielder projects mild bewilderment. Evans — who entered Holmes's life in 2017, at the peak of her scandal, and by the film's account never quite blinks — projects something harder to name. The chemistry between Fielder's needling social surgery and Holmes's apparent imperviousness to it generates a strange and genuinely unclassifiable dramatic tension. The film runs three hours, and the review you are reading will not tell you what happens in the back half. What can be said is that things devolve in a characteristically Fielderian spiral — a dissection of documentary form that goes further than The Rehearsal's most destabilizing gambits — and that questions you assumed would remain safely unasked do get asked. Including, apparently, ones about the conjugal visiting arrangements at the Texas federal prison where Holmes currently resides. The film's willingness to go there is partly what separates it from the genre of prestige-adjacent true-crime content it superficially resembles. The critique most often leveled at Fielder's earlier work — that it punches down, extracting comedy from the naivety of ordinary people who don't fully understand what they've signed up for — finds a genuine answer here. Holmes is not a naive participant. Evans is not a naive participant. Whatever is happening between these four people across the film's runtime, it does not resolve neatly into filmmaker-as-predator or subject-as-victim. The power dynamics shift, blur, and occasionally reverse in ways that feel genuinely surprising and structurally earned rather than manufactured. The score treats the material as drama. The pacing treats it as a thriller. The form — documentary, or something that started as documentary — treats it as something else by the end, something the genre vocabulary doesn't quite have a word for yet. That formal uncertainty is not a flaw. It is the point. You Can See Everything is, at minimum, the best thing either director has made, and it arrives as a legitimate event in the tradition of nonfiction filmmaking that includes Capturing the Friedmans and The Act of Killing: work that uses access to reveal not just a subject but the act of filming itself as a site of contest and manipulation. Whether it gets you any closer to understanding Elizabeth Holmes is, appropriately, left as an exercise for the viewer.
