Watching You Can See Everything, the disorienting new documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, feels akin to watching your own brain attempt to punch its way out of a sealed paper bag, or waking up abruptly from a deeply layered, Inception-style dream within a dream. To describe the winding, nearly three-hour film to anyone entirely unfamiliar with its vast, dizzying layers of context is no small feat. It requires navigating Fielder’s signature Dadaist, boundaryless approach to his subjects alongside Holmes’s hypnotic affect—an ambiguous aura that constantly teeters on the precipice between highly effective gaslighting and blinding, self-deluded earnestness. To this day, determining which is which remains an elusive puzzle.
What happens when you introduce two fundamentally unreliable narrators—or three, if you factor in Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-screen persona undergoes a jarring metamorphosis from a protective, naive tech bro into an unscrupulous grifter—lock them inside a metaphorical jar, and vigorously shake them? The inevitable result is that the more questions are asked, the further the truth drifts completely out of reach. Watching the documentary feels precisely like staring intently at a Magic Eye image, desperately crossing your eyes in an effort to make out the hidden three-dimensional subject, only for it never to quite materialize. Eventually, you are left with a lingering anxiety that your eyes might just get stuck that way permanently.
While the wider discourse surrounding the film is already dense and abundant, one microscopic detail in particular has begun dominating conversations: the eggs.
For anyone familiar with the signature hallmarks of Fielderian programming, it comes as no surprise that Fielder possesses a distinct penchant for hyperfixating on seemingly mundane, throwaway details that later return to completely upend the audience’s expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such pivotal detail is observed during a quiet exchange between Holmes and Evans as they attempt to make breakfast. How much substantive meaning can truly be gleaned from watching someone cook a morning meal? As it turns out, an astonishing amount.
During the first half of the film, Fielder is fully embedded within the rental home of Holmes and Evans. The couple has inexplicably invited the filmmakers to document the final, tense weeks before Holmes is required to report to federal prison to begin serving her sentence. The precise mechanism and rationale behind their agreement to this deeply revealing arrangement remain entirely incomprehensible to anyone vaguely familiar with Fielder’s body of work. Throughout this intimate segment, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn toward Holmes. She appears intensely focused on convincing the filmmakers—and Fielder specifically—that she is nothing more than a sweet, deeply misunderstood victim of circumstance, rather than a Machiavellian con artist who defrauded millions from trusting investors.
Frankly, aspects of this carefully crafted claim feel genuinely convincing at moments throughout the runtime. Viewers are invited into her ostensibly less guarded, domestic sphere, including a scene in which she prepares breakfast alongside Evans. As Fielder interviews her on camera, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs using a simple fork. The camera lingers uncomfortably on her feeble, uninspired whisking technique. Then, after a few agonizingly awkward seconds, another set of hands abruptly enters the frame: those of Evans. Without uttering a single word, he unceremoniously takes the bowl and the fork right out of Holmes’s hands and begins whipping the eggs with a considerably greater, almost aggressive fervor.
Backseat driving in the kitchen is hardly an uncommon phenomenon among domestic couples, though it is frequently recognized as a fast track to petty bickering. Notably, Evans informs Fielder at one point that he and Holmes "never fight," while Holmes is equally emphatic in her insistence that she has never told a lie in her entire life. Once again, the audience is confronted with thoroughly unreliable narrators. What is considerably less common—or at least generally considered rude, domineering, and socially aggressive—is aggressively snatching an item out of your romantic partner’s hands mid-task simply to take over the chore entirely. Fielder seizes on this moment, directly asking Evans why he felt such an urgent need to forcefully take over the eggs. Holmes promptly steps in with an explanation, noting that Evans simply dislikes the way she mixes them and genuinely believes he can do it better himself.
It is an undeniably tiny interaction, yet it remains a remarkably revealing one. Evans feels entirely comfortable seizing total control over a task Holmes is actively performing, doing so without even so much as asking permission, and he appears largely oblivious to how his domineering behavior might read on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears entirely accustomed to this sudden intrusion of autonomy, offering a passive explanation rather than an objection. Granted, unlike the sustained and unblinking eye contact that has long followed her public persona, beating eggs does not appear to be among Ms. Holmes’s primary strengths. Typically, standard culinary practice dictates that eggs must be beaten vigorously in order to properly incorporate air, ensuring a fluffier texture for an omelet or a scramble.
Yet, because this is Elizabeth Holmes, viewers are forced to ask a deeper, more cynical question: Could this be a textbook case of weaponized incompetence? Is it entirely possible that, wishing to avoid the tedious task of beating the eggs herself, she intentionally performed the job with insufficient effort specifically to goad Evans into taking over? Is she truly being controlled by her partner, or is she brilliantly orchestrating a dynamic where someone else is forced to do her manual labor? Alternatively, is this merely further evidence of her fundamentally "different" way of thinking—a cognitive disconnect where she genuinely does not grasp the culturally accepted "right" way to beat a simple breakfast ingredient?
During her interviews in the documentary, Holmes frames the chaotic Theranos years as an era during which she was heavily manipulated by her former romantic partner and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She steadfastly maintains that her ultimate intentions were always noble and beneficial for humanity at large, regardless of the devastating collateral consequences for investors and everyday patients who received dangerously unreliable medical test results. Whether she actually believes this revisionist account of her history, or if she simply possesses an unmatched, veteran talent for selling it, remains one of the film’s central, unresolved mysteries. Equally mysterious is the degree to which her romantic partnerships consistently lead her to willingly take the full legal and public fall for the actions of arguably worse men.
These haunting questions reverberate intensely into the second half of the documentary. Following Holmes’s departure to federal prison, the narrative introduces a series of deeply unsettling revelations regarding Evans. It is revealed that he holds power of attorney over Holmes and has been utilizing her official X account to publish bizarre, profanity-laced remarks that feel entirely incongruous with her historically careful, calculated manner of speaking. Suddenly, the seemingly benign egg-beating scene takes on a darker hue, looking less like a domestic quirk and more like an early harbinger that Evans is far more domineering and controlling than the protective-partner persona he meticulously presented to the cameras.
His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be genuine on some psychological level, but it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile that facade with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another bizarre-seeming entrepreneur’s obsessive replication of Theranos. Furthermore, viewers are left to grapple with his apparent passive acceptance of the terrifying possibility that her artificial intelligence-generated likeness could be exploited to create pornography or other unauthorized content entirely antithetical to her personal interests.
Even as Evans steadily emerges as an increasingly unsavory and manipulative character, Holmes herself remains utterly inscrutable. Does she possess any awareness of what he is doing on the outside? Does she tacitly approve of his actions? Is he ruthlessly exploiting her vulnerable incarcerated circumstances for personal gain, or are the two of them actively working in tandem toward a shared objective—whether reputational, monetary, or otherwise? The documentary provides a kaleidoscopic array of conflicting evidence for competing interpretations, including the unsettling possibility that even if Holmes is being subjugated, she may genuinely be content within that peculiar dynamic.
What is truly extraordinary about the collaborative work of Fielder and Oppenheim is its optical-illusion-like layers of constructed and deconstructed "truth." Despite the film’s numerous harrowing, lingering close-ups capturing the most minute microexpressions, there remains a vast chasm between what Holmes and Evans explicitly say, what they actually do, and what they have planned for the future, such as launching a rumored Theranos 2.0 entity reportedly named Haemanthus. Added to this complex matrix is Fielder’s own well-documented history as a brilliant provocateur—a faux-earnest performance artist and magician willing to go to virtually any absurd lengths to actualize a conceptual framework, all while maintaining a stone-cold, deadpan straight face through the most surreal scenarios imaginable.
Knowing Fielder’s artistic history naturally invites skepticism regarding his own sincerity throughout the project. There are several distinct moments in the film where audience members are left wondering if there is a palpable, lingering sexual chemistry between him and Holmes, and whether Fielder might actually act upon it. If he were to cross that line, viewers are left divided over whether such an action would be born of genuine human connection or executed as another layer of high-concept performance art, further blurring the already non-existent barriers between reality and staging for the comedian.
Ultimately, the documentary’s most revealing moments are precisely those that feel entirely off-script for every participant involved: a fleeting, unguarded facial expression, an odd word choice dropping in the middle of an otherwise intensely emphatic statement, or a tense series of unspoken gestures exchanged over a simple bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects, having willingly invited cameras into their lives to be watched, find themselves with very few moments where they truly forget the lens is there; yet it is precisely those rare instances that offer the clearest, albeit still murky, insight into their actual reality.
That persistent murkiness appears to be both the central point and the ultimate irony embedded within the film’s title. You Can See Everything successfully elevates Nathan Fielder’s critical reputation far beyond his legacy as merely a master of cringe-inducing comedy, revealing a profound glimmer of genuine directorial genius. The story feels almost fateful in its capacity to showcase his unique creative gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities governing how humans interact with one another behind closed doors. Even when a conceptual idea is massive in scope, the documentary reminds us that it is the smallest, most overlooked details that matter the most. And in a cinematic project that explicitly promises the viewer can see everything, we ultimately learn that the burden falls squarely on us to look closer—only to discover that what we think we see might look entirely different depending on the light in which it is viewed.