This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the house lights came up following a screening of You Can See Everything—the wildly confounding new documentary chronicling the final weeks of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes prior to her federal prison sentence—the immediate sensation was not unlike waking from a multi-layered, architectural dream straight out of science fiction. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the nearly three-hour cinematic puzzle defies easy categorization. It is a sweeping, deeply unsettling study of modern myth-making, constructed around subjects who embody competing definitions of unreliability. On one side stands Holmes, whose mesmerizing, hypnotic affect hovers indefinitely between calculated gaslighting and blinding, self-deluded earnestness. On the other stands Fielder, whose Dadaist, boundary-pushing approach to documentary filmmaking routinely dissolves the line between absolute reality and elaborate performance art.
When you take two fundamentally unreliable narrators—or three, if you factor in Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-screen transformation from a protective, naive tech bro to an unscrupulous grifter is nothing short of dizzying—and place them under a microscope, the pursuit of objective truth becomes an exercise in frustration. The more questions the filmmakers ask, the further reality seems to recede. Watching the film is reminiscent of staring intensely at a classic Magic Eye autostereogram, slightly crossing your eyes in a desperate attempt to force the hidden three-dimensional image into focus. You stare so hard and so long that a lingering anxiety begins to creep in, whispering that your eyes might just stay stuck that way permanently.
While the broader discourse surrounding the film’s moral and ethical implications is already vast and contentious, the true genius of Fielderian programming often lies in its hyperfixation on the seemingly mundane. In You Can See Everything, that microscopic detail arrives in a brief, unassuming exchange between Holmes and Evans as they prepare breakfast together in their temporary rental home. How much meaning, one might ask, can genuinely be gleaned from watching two people make a simple morning meal? As it turns out, an extraordinary amount.
In the first half of the documentary, Fielder is fully embedded in the domestic space of Holmes and Evans, who inexplicably chose to invite the filmmakers into their home as the clock wound down on Holmes’s freedom. How and why they agreed to such an arrangement, given even a passing familiarity with Fielder’s previous subversive television projects, remains entirely incomprehensible. During these domestic sequences, the narrative takes a jarring, surprisingly sympathetic detour toward Holmes. She appears determined to convince the crew—and Fielder in particular—that she is nothing more than a gentle, deeply misunderstood victim of circumstance, rather than the Machiavellian mastermind who defrauded high-profile investors and misled vulnerable patients. At times, fragments of her defense feel unnervingly convincing. Viewers are granted access to moments meant to feel unguarded, including a scene in the kitchen where Holmes prepares breakfast alongside Evans.
As Fielder conducts an interview, Holmes stands at the counter, unenthusiastically and limply beating a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera lingers on her remarkably feeble, uncommitted whisking technique. Then, after a few seconds of awkward silence, a second set of hands enters the frame, belonging to Evans. Without a single word of warning or negotiation, he reaches out, takes the bowl and fork directly from Holmes’s hands, and begins whipping the eggs with a sudden, aggressive surge of energy and fervor.
The act of backseat driving in the kitchen is certainly no stranger to domestic partnerships, though it is notoriously viewed as a fast track to marital bickering. Interestingly, Evans tells Fielder earlier in the documentary that he and Holmes “never fight,” while Holmes insists with absolute emphasis that she has never told a lie in her life—further cementing their status as deeply unreliable narrators. Yet, what transcends ordinary domestic friction—and borders on the profoundly rude and domineering—is the act of physically snatching an implement out of a partner’s hands mid-task simply to take over. Fielder immediately flags this subtle power dynamic, turning to Evans to ask why he felt compelled to usurp the task. Holmes quickly steps in with an explanation, noting that Evans simply dislikes the way she mixes eggs and firmly believes he can do it better.
It is a microscopic interaction, yet it is remarkably revealing. Evans feels entirely comfortable seizing control of an activity Holmes is actively performing, doing so without asking and seemingly oblivious to how the moment will read on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears thoroughly accustomed to this sort of intrusion, offering a passive justification rather than a defensive objection. Granted, unlike the sustained, unblinking eye contact that has long been a hallmark of her public persona, vigorous whisking does not appear to be among Ms. Holmes’s hidden talents. Standard culinary practice dictates that eggs must be beaten with enough vigor to properly aerate them, introducing air to ensure a light and fluffy scramble or omelet. Holmes’s listless stirring accomplishes none of this.
Yet, viewed through the cynical lens that characterizes any analysis of Elizabeth Holmes, deeper and more complicated questions inevitably arise. Could this be a calculated display of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, wishing to avoid the manual labor of beating eggs entirely, she intentionally performs the task with such lackluster effort that Evans feels forced to step in and rescue the breakfast? Is she genuinely being controlled by an overbearing partner, or is she brilliantly engineering a scenario where someone else simply does the work for her? Or perhaps, true to her defense, this is merely another manifestation of her idiosyncratic worldview—evidence that she genuinely lacks a baseline understanding of the correct way to perform everyday human tasks.
Throughout the film’s interviews, Holmes frames her infamous Theranos years as a period of profound manipulation by her former romantic partner and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She maintains to the bitter end that her foundational intentions were noble and designed to benefit humanity, regardless of the devastating collateral damage inflicted upon trusting investors and patients who received inaccurate medical data. Whether Holmes genuinely believes this revisionist history or has simply spent years mastering the art of selling it remains one of the documentary’s most elusive mysteries. Equally mysterious is the degree to which her romantic choices consistently position her to take the fall for the actions of men whose behavior is, at best, deeply questionable.
These haunting inquiries echo with amplified intensity in the second half of the film. Following Holmes’s departure for federal prison, the documentary exposes a series of deeply unsettling revelations regarding Evans. It is revealed that Evans holds power of attorney over Holmes and has quietly commandeered her official social media accounts, utilizing her online presence to publish bizarre, profanity-laced statements that bear no resemblance to her actual voice or manner of speaking. Suddenly, the seemingly benign kitchen scene involving the eggs is recast in a chilling new light, appearing less like quirky domestic bickering and more like an early warning sign of a much more domineering partner than the protective, naive tech bro he initially projected to the world.
While Evans’s outward expressions of vigilance toward Holmes may possess a grain of genuine concern, that protective narrative becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with his subsequent actions. Viewers learn of his willingness to license her image for public billboards promoting an eccentric entrepreneur’s bizarre obsession with reviving the spirit of Theranos. Even more disturbing is his apparent apathy toward the possibility that Holmes’s AI-generated likeness could be exploited to produce pornography or other content entirely antithetical to her personal interests and dignity.
And yet, even as Evans solidifies his status as an increasingly unsavory figure, Holmes herself remains an impenetrable enigma. Does she have any awareness of what Evans is doing in her absence? Does she implicitly or explicitly approve of these maneuvers? Is he ruthlessly exploiting her catastrophic legal situation for personal gain, or are the two engaged in a coordinated, mutually beneficial strategy aimed at salvaging their reputation, securing financial footholds, or positioning themselves for a future comeback? The documentary brilliantly refuses to provide a single, comforting answer, offering instead a kaleidoscopic array of interpretations. Even if Holmes is indeed being subjugated by a controlling partner, the film leaves open the deeply unsettling possibility that she is entirely content within that exact dynamic.
What makes Fielder and Oppenheim’s collaboration so extraordinary is its masterful construction of optical-illusion-like layers of constructed reality. Beyond the harrowing close-ups of microexpressions and guarded glances, viewers are forced to navigate a maze of contradictions: there is what Holmes and Evans explicitly say, contrasted against what they have done, what they are currently doing, and what they reportedly plan to do next—such as launching a purported Theranos successor venture ominously dubbed Haemanthus. Hovering over all of this is Fielder’s own well-documented history as a provocateur, a deadpan magician of social engineering who is entirely willing to push a conceptual premise to its absolute logical extreme while maintaining a face of absolute stone.
Naturally, Fielder’s own sincerity cannot escape scrutiny. Throughout the runtime, moments arise where viewers are left questioning whether a strange, palpable tension exists between Fielder and Holmes, and whether the filmmaker might ever cross ethical boundaries to explore it. If such an interaction were to occur, audiences are left stranded in a state of perpetual doubt over whether it would stem from genuine human connection, sophisticated performance art, or a reality where those two distinct concepts have permanently merged into one.
Ultimately, the most revealing moments in You Can See Everything are those rare, unscripted instances that shatter the polished facade for everyone involved: a fleeting microexpression of exhaustion, an unexpected word choice dropped into an otherwise rehearsed declaration, or a series of silent, charged gestures exchanged over a bowl of unwhisked eggs. The documentary’s subjects willingly invited an audience into their lives to be watched under a microscope, yet the moments where they briefly forgot the cameras were rolling provide the only fleeting glimpses into their actual reality. Yet, even those glimpses remain stubbornly murky. That ambiguity is not only the central thesis of the project, but the biting irony encoded within its title.
You Can See Everything elevates Nathan Fielder’s artistic reputation far beyond his established mastery of cringe comedy, revealing a profound and undeniable stroke of directorial genius. The project feels almost fateful in its execution, perfectly tailored to highlight his unique gift for exposing the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexity of human interaction. Even when dealing with grand, institutional failures, the narrative proves that it is the smallest, most insignificant details that carry the heaviest weight. In a documentary that boldly promises you can see everything, the ultimate takeaway is a humbling reminder that true understanding requires us to look with agonizing closeness—and that even then, what we think we see will inevitably shift when exposed to a different light.