{"id":1048590,"date":"2026-09-07T09:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T09:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1048590\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T09:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T09:49:13","slug":"you-can-see-everything-review-nathan-fielders-elizabeth-holmes-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1048590\/","title":{"rendered":"‘You Can See Everything’ Review: Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn a world where Lindsay Clancy can inspire an onslaught of sympathetic voyeuristic fascination, why not Elizabeth Holmes<\/a>? Earlier tonight, the screening of an unannounced mystery movie at the Telluride Film Festival<\/a> generated every bit as much pre-screening buzz as any of the major titles programmed here. And when the movie was revealed to be \u201cYou Can See Everything<\/a>,\u201d a 174-minute documentary, co-directed by the cult comedian Nathan Fielder<\/a>, about Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos who is now serving an 11-year prison sentence after being convicted of defrauding her investors, the sensation of \u201cWTF? I\u2019ve got to watch this!\u201d did not subside as the movie went on. It only intensified.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou Can See Everything\u201d is just about the furthest thing from a \u201cpure\u201d documentary you\u2019ve ever seen. That\u2019s part of its appeal \u2014 it\u2019s a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus. Yet it\u2019s been made with a spirit of true inquiry, driven by Fielder\u2019s acidly quizzical personality (as an onscreen interviewer, he\u2019s got the most drop-dead deadpan since Steven Wright), and it gets its hooks in you.<\/p>\n

\n\tFielder isn\u2019t here to throw open the question of Elizabeth Holmes\u2019 guilt. He wants to know what made her tick. But why, you may ask, is the comedian behind shows like \u201cThe Curse\u201d and \u201cThe Rehearsal\u201d making a three-hour movie about the woman who became America\u2019s youngest self-made female billionaire by convincing the world that she\u2019d created a revolutionary new means of blood testing? Holmes, after her conviction, stayed out of the public eye, but shortly before her prison sentence was set to begin she decided she wanted someone to document her last days of freedom. Maybe she wanted to have her say?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhatever the motivation, Fielder, who has often operated in a nether zone between fiction and reality, was looking for a project to collaborate on with Lance Oppenheim, a documentarian he\u2019d become friendly with. And so, with the support of A24, and without quite knowing what they were after (or, by their own admission, what the hell they were doing), the two of them stepped into the breach. Thirty-five days before the start of Holmes\u2019 prison sentence, in 2023, they brought a camera crew to the spacious wood-paneled beachside home in Del Mar where she was living with her partner, the California hotel heir Billy Evans, and their two children (including an infant daughter). Fielder was there to hang out, observe, and interview Holmes, trying to get inside her head. That proved to be a weirder and wilder journey than anyone might have expected.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Elizabeth Holmes we see has a winsome soft presence, with a Cupid\u2019s-bow grin and eyes that beam without blinking too much. She resembles the \u201980s and \u201990s actress Kim Greist, and has a manner that\u2019s disarming in its gentleness. Yet when Fielder asks about the crimes she was convicted of, she pleads a strange kind of ignorance. She claims she did nothing wrong, and it\u2019s clear she believes it. But how is that possible?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2015, Holmes had become a celebrity entrepreneur, based on the $9 billion valuation of her health technology company, Theranos \u2014 a company that turned out to have been built on a complete scam. For a brief time, Holmes convinced the world that she\u2019d developed a revolutionary device for blood testing that required very small volumes of blood, such as the amount you\u2019d get from a pinprick. She convinced top-drawer investors (including Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison) to pour millions of dollars into the company. For credibility, she assembled a board of directors that included such ancient luminaries as George P. Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Mattis. There was only one problem: the \u201crevolutionary\u201d technology didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

\n\tNumerous experts, starting with the Stanford medical professor Phyllis Gardner, told Holmes that her idea wouldn\u2019t work; you couldn\u2019t mine voluminous amounts of data from just a few droplets of blood. But Holmes, along with her business partner, Ramesh \u201cSunny\u201d Balwani (who was also her romantic partner), sold the deception anyway. For a short while they were quite \u201csuccessful\u201d at it, though in hindsight it\u2019s clear that the castle in the air they built \u2014 all spun out of the trendy idea that medical science could be democratized \u2014 was destined to crash and burn. Because it was all made up! Holmes had spun the pinprick idea out of her own fear of needles. This was her fantasy, elevated into an invention that didn\u2019t actually exist.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo how can she defend herself now? What she tells Fielder, with an implacable conviction that suggests a belief in her own narrative that\u2019s nothing short of monomaniacal, is that the device patented by Theranos, which she sold as \u201cthe iPod of health care,\u201d could, in fact, host any blood test that existed. The only thing they hadn\u2019t quite worked out was the chemistry that would go into the tests. In other words, the device was based on the projection of a technology that didn\u2019t exist yet. But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff\u2026that hadn\u2019t been invented yet\u2026as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved. (Have the solution on my desk Monday morning!) <\/p>\n

\n\tShe believes her version of reality. Fielder, who is not taken in by any of this (his questions remain rigorous in their skepticism), at one point gives vent to his impish side by showing Elizabeth and Billy the famous Abbott and Costello routine \u201cWho\u2019s on First?\u201d When it ends, he tries to get Holmes to explain what the joke is (that \u201cWho\u201d is the first baseman\u2019s name, but the name sounds like a question \u2014 hence the routine\u2019s glorious verbal slapstick). And she can\u2019t do it; she can\u2019t grasp the joke. It\u2019s not just that she lacks a sense of humor (though frankly, she kind of does). It\u2019s that she\u2019s got the malignant narcissist\u2019s need to have words mean only what she decrees them to mean. She can\u2019t hear any other meaning. Hence: her device did \u201cwork,\u201d and still does (it can run any test!). That\u2019s why she and Bobby, years after her conviction, are still pitching Theranos to other investors (as if anyone would go near her). This is a highly rarefied level of delusional thinking.<\/p>\n

\n\tHolmes says to Fielder that she\u2019s never told a lie in her life. Her whole vibe is \u201csincerity.\u201d (Though it\u2019s also one of passive-aggressive unbroken-eye-contact creepiness.) The lesson of her legal case isn\u2019t just that she was found guilty of defrauding investors, but that her faulty device, had it been put on the market, would have hurt people. That\u2019s why the real question \u201cYou Can See Everything\u201d is asking isn\u2019t: Is she guilty? Rather, it\u2019s: What makes people like Elizabeth Holmes tick? (And how many of them are out there?) Fielder and Elizabeth and Bobby sit down to watch the 2022 Hulu miniseries \u201cThe Dropout,\u201d which was based on the case, with Amanda Seyfried giving a pointed performance as Holmes. Holmes suggests that the series is a TV-movie crock. But is it?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary\u2019s first half ends with Holmes saying goodbye to her family and going off to the minimum-security Bryan Prison in Texas. The prison won\u2019t allow anyone to interview her, so that\u2019s more or less the last we\u2019ll see of her. And we\u2019ve pretty much gotten the skinny on her, which is that she has a wall of denial standing between herself and the truth, and an indifference to the harm she might have caused, that borders on the sociopathic. So what is there left to discover?<\/p>\n

\n\tPlenty, it turns out. With Holmes out of the picture, Fielder needs someone to sustain her presence. So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we\u2019ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her. Are you feeling the meta of it all? That sounds like a stunt, but as the documentary goes on, and Fielder creates transcripts of things that Holmes has spoken (including a phone chat he has with her in prison), who better to read the transcripts \u2014 to turn this reality into theater, and by doing so turn it back into reality \u2014 than Amanda Seyfried? She gives an increasingly accurate performance as Holmes, getting inside her head, to the point that her acting is almost eerie in its power. Seyfried even starts to sympathize with Holmes, at least when it comes to what a glowering aggro control freak her partner Bobby is. As Bobby continues to make himself accessible to the filmmakers, exposing his dark side at every turn, I was afraid the movie might use him to create a kind of toxic excuse for what Holmes did.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut part of the jaunty power of \u201cYou Can See Everything\u201d is that the film never mounts an apologia for Elizabeth Holmes. Bobby may be repugnant in his cockiness, and in the way he takes control of Holmes\u2019 image, allowing the iconic photograph of her making the \u201cOK\u201d sign to be used on billboards, tweeting out hostile tweets under her name, and striking a deal with the A24 executives \u2014 yes, there\u2019s a meeting with them in the movie, at which point we\u2019re either in meta heaven or hell \u2014 that will give him some of the profits from the movie. Does Holmes know about the deal? No. But she claims to want it that way. Her grand assertion is that she never cared about the money. And yet the money \u2014 the value of her company \u2014 became the very core of her identity. \u201cYou Can See Everything\u201d overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness, to the point that it brings you to the enigmatic space where all those things meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a world where Lindsay Clancy can inspire an onslaught of sympathetic voyeuristic fascination, why not Elizabeth Holmes?…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1048591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[164070,171,73570,104193,67,132,68,419747],"class_list":["post-1048590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-elizabeth-holmes","tag-entertainment","tag-nathan-fielder","tag-telluride-film-festival","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-you-can-see-everything"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117229136573064017","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1048591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}