A24’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Becomes a Cultural Phenomenon

The documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, has emerged as a landmark cinematic event. Until its recent wide release, the project was shrouded in intense secrecy, creating significant anticipation. The film centers on a 2023 interaction where Fielder, known for his deadpan style, sits across from disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. In a tight, high-saturation shot, Fielder asks Holmes, “Are you being real right now?” while the two lock eyes. This moment, which has become a focal point for audiences, captures the central tension of the film. The new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy, i f there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything. Where You Can See Everything had the most successful opening weekend for a documentary in over 20 years – Fielder and Oppenheim kept filming, but luckily for us – and the theatrical box office. From Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful The Social Reckoning to Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI film Artificial to Alex Gibney’s colossal doc Musk, that feel insufficient to the magnitude and lunacy of the moment, you Can See Everything coincidentally arrives amid a new wave of Hollywood attempts to make sense of tech world.

The first half of the three-hour project documents Fielder’s attempts to engage with Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their two young children while they resided in a beachfront rental property. During this period, the production crew captured a bizarre dynamic as Fielder tried to confront Holmes about her past deceptions, including her insistence that Theranos diagnostic devices were capable of performing 1,000 specific tests. Holmes maintained her innocence throughout these encounters, at one point claiming she had never told a lie, a assertion that Fielder and his team challenged during their months of embedded filming. The only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and/or the theatrical experience could talk about – takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud, that first half – essentially. This chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV’s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot’s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side, it’s not exactly comedic. Despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests, or when she continued to insist. Given how obviously mendacious she and her husband appear, and also understandable: the more time you spend with her – the more time you spend watching Fielder spend time with her – the more magnetic the force of her delusions, it’s at once astounding how many people took her seriously. Which picks up in 2025, after Holmes has spent some time in prison, makes You Can See Everything the film of the year – a formally ambitious feat that not only pushes the boundar, it’s the back half of this immense movie. And one of the best lines of an extremely rich text, when the comedian immediately shoots back with his own irritation: “No, you don’t, it is a relief. It would probably have generated some attention and then faded as an artefact of a particular era of Silicon Valley celebrity, a briefly fascinating but inconclusive stunt, if the first half had been released as a standalone film. As if their presentation did not reflect the makers’ own biases and motivations, but documentary tends to court the benefit of the doubt. Confronted by famous representations of themselves, two very famous people. By being neither bound to representation nor straightforward journalism, You Can See Everything gets to what we might call the “emotional truth” of this era – and not just because Evans, a professed Charlie Kirk fan seemingly radicalized by his Musk-owned X timeline who commissioned an AI hologram of his wife, emerges as a very 2020s villain, a tech bro with a possible drug problem and a god complex.

The interaction between the filmmaker and his subjects is characterized by a surreal power struggle. At one point, Evans expresses frustration with Fielder’s questioning regarding the technical limitations of Theranos hardware, telling the director, “I know what you’re feeling.” Fielder swiftly shuts down the observation with a curt, “No, you don’t.” This sequence highlights the fundamental difficulty in establishing a clear read on Holmes, who often oscillates between perceived sincerity and manipulative falsehoods.

Following its successful opening, which marked the highest box office debut for a documentary in over two decades, the film has shifted from a mere character study to a commentary on contemporary media. While the first half functions as an elevated true-crime investigation, the second half, set in 2025 following Holmes’s incarceration, shifts into a highly experimental narrative. This transition has helped the movie garner near-perfect reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and high rankings on platforms like Letterboxd, fueling speculation about a potential Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film’s existence was announced in September, that question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie.

A major turning point in the film occurs when Fielder brings in actor Amanda Seyfried to participate. Seyfried previously portrayed Holmes in the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout. The film captures the meta-narrative of Seyfried watching footage of herself playing Holmes, while simultaneously being integrated into Fielder’s complex re-enactments. These simulations are designed to probe the emotional truth of the scandal, moving beyond standard journalistic practices to explore the complexities of representing a real person through dramatic artifice. Star of The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series on the Theranos debacle, in the second half of the movie – stop now if you haven’t seen – Fielder recruits a shockingly game (and possibly awards-worthy ) Amanda Seyfried. The Dropout, for what it’s worth, was the best of a series of scam shows from 2022 that tried to turn the rise and fall of inflated 2010s tech companies such as Uber or WeWork into entertainment. (One of the film’s best. And that its liberties may have violated another person, seyfried oscillates between a conviction that The Dropout was a work of fiction grounded in fact. The Dropout, for what it’s worth, was the best of a series of scam shows from 2022 that tried to turn the rise and fall of inflated 2010s tech companies such as Uber or WeWork into entertainment. (One of the film’s best punchlines is simply observing that Evans, with his “LASERS” license plate and obsession with a new Theranos “device”, continues to push Theranos 2.0 … at a WeWork).

Through these layered reconstructions, the film forces the viewer to confront the instability of truth in the AI era, where images and testimonies are increasingly subject to skepticism. By avoiding the typical constraints of nonfiction, the production examines the ethical responsibilities inherent in the storytelling process. The inclusion of Evans—who is portrayed as a fervent supporter of Charlie Kirk and a consumer of content on Elon Musk’s X—serves as a reminder of the broader political and social contexts that surrounded Holmes during her rise and subsequent downfall. In feel, the pull of an internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves, this section resembles.