This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the lights go down and the screen flickers to life, watching You Can See Everything—the boundary-pushing new documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—feels less like sitting through a traditional cinematic experience and more like trying to punch your way out of a burlap sack. The nearly three-hour runtime washes over the viewer like an Inception-esque descent into a dream within a dream, winding and twisting through layers of context that defy easy categorization. On one hand, you have Fielder’s signature Dadaist, boundaryless approach to documentary filmmaking; on the other, you are confronted with Holmes’s hypnotic, unsettling affect. Is it the product of highly effective gaslighting, or is it blinding, self-deluded earnestness? Hours after the credits roll, that central question remains frustratingly unanswered.
What happens when you take two unreliable narrators—and make that three, if you include Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-screen persona morphs from protective, naive tech bro into something resembling an unscrupulous grifter—put them in a metaphorical jar, and shake them vigorously? The result is a dizzying descent where the more questions are asked, the further the truth drifts out of reach. It is remarkably similar to staring at a Magic Eye image, desperately crossing your eyes in the hope of forcing the hidden three-dimensional subject into focus, only to come up empty while secretly worrying your eyes might get stuck that way.
While the public discourse surrounding the film is already dense and rapidly expanding, the most telling revelations often emerge from the most microscopic details. If you are familiar with the distinct hallmarks of Fielder’s television programming, you know that the comedian-filmmaker is prone to hyperfixating on seemingly mundane, throwaway moments that later return to completely upend the audience’s expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such pivotal detail is observed during a seemingly innocuous exchange between Holmes and Evans as they attempt to make breakfast together. How much narrative weight can truly be gleaned from watching someone scramble eggs? As it turns out, an astonishing amount.
In the first half of the documentary, Fielder is fully embedded in the rental home of Holmes and Evans. The couple has inexplicably invited the filmmakers into their private space to document the tense, final weeks before Holmes is scheduled to report to federal prison. The exact motivations behind why they agreed to this high-risk documentary arrangement remain entirely incomprehensible—especially if either of them had even a passing familiarity with Fielder’s history of psychological provocation. During these domestic scenes, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn toward Holmes. She appears intensely focused on convincing the filmmakers, and Fielder specifically, that she is actually a sweet, deeply misunderstood victim of circumstance rather than a Machiavellian con woman who defrauded millions from high-profile investors.
Frankly, at various points throughout the runtime, aspects of this curated self-image feel strangely convincing. Viewers are invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded domestic moments, including a scene in which she attempts to make breakfast with Evans. As Fielder conducts an interview in the background, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera deliberately lingers on her feeble, uninspired whisking technique. Then, after a few awkward seconds, a second set of hands enters the frame, belonging to Evans. Without uttering a single word, he takes the bowl and fork directly 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 partners, though it routinely acts as a fast track to minor bickering and household tension. Evans notes to Fielder at one point that he and Holmes “never fight,” while Holmes remains emphatically insistent that she has never lied in a single instance throughout her entire life. Once again, the audience is confronted with unreliable narrators. However, what is significantly less common—or at least widely considered socially rude and overbearing—is the act of aggressively grabbing something out of your partner’s hands mid-task to forcibly take over the chore. Fielder rightly points this out, turning to Evans to ask why he felt such an urgent need to commandeer the eggs. Holmes casually explains that Evans simply doesn’t like the way she mixes them and genuinely believes he can do it better.
It is a remarkably tiny interaction, yet it carries immense psychological weight. Evans feels entirely comfortable taking total control of a task Holmes is actively performing, without so much manner of asking or hesitation, and he appears largely oblivious to how his domineering behavior might translate on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears entirely accustomed to this sort of intrusion, offering a passive explanation rather than an objection or a flash of annoyance. Granted, unlike the famous sustained and unblinking eye contact that defined her corporate heyday, beating eggs does not appear to be one of Ms. Holmes’s hidden strengths. Standard culinary practice dictates that one should beat eggs vigorously to properly incorporate air and create a fluffy texture for an omelet or scramble, neither of which Holmes’s half-hearted fork-jabbing was ever going to achieve.
Yet, because the subject is Elizabeth Holmes, the viewer is forced to ask a darker question: Could this be a calculated case of weaponized incompetence? Is it entirely possible that, wishing to avoid the manual labor of beating the eggs, she intentionally performed the task poorly so that Evans would feel compelled to step in and take over? Is she genuinely being controlled by a domineering partner, or is she brilliantly manipulating someone else into doing her work for her? Or perhaps, this is simply further evidence of her fundamentally different way of thinking—a cognitive blind spot where she genuinely does not comprehend the socially recognized “right” way to whisk a breakfast staple.
Throughout the interviews featured in the documentary, Holmes portrays her tumultuous Theranos years as a period during which she was emotionally and professionally manipulated by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She consistently maintains that her ultimate intentions were noble and designed to benefit humanity, regardless of the catastrophic financial consequences for investors and the dangerous health risks for patients who received flawed, unreliable test results from her faulty blood-testing devices. Whether Holmes genuinely believes this revisionist account of her past or simply possesses the polished salesmanship to keep pushing the narrative remains one of the film’s central, unresolved mysteries. It runs parallel to the broader question of the extent to which her romantic partnerships consistently lead her to act as a shield or a scapegoat for the actions of worse men in her orbit.
These profound questions reverberate with renewed intensity in the second half of the documentary. Following Holmes’s departure for prison, the film introduces a series of deeply unsettling revelations regarding Evans. Viewers learn that he retains power of attorney over Holmes and has been utilizing her official X account to publish strange, profanity-laced remarks that feel entirely incongruent with her meticulously cultivated, soft-spoken personal mannerisms. Suddenly, the seemingly benign kitchen scene involving the eggs takes on a much darker hue, acting as an early visual indicator that Evans is far more controlling and domineering than the protective, innocent partner persona he projected early on. His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may possess a kernel of authenticity, but it is nearly impossible to reconcile with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another bizarre entrepreneur’s obsessive emulation of Theranos, or his apparent nonchalance regarding the possibility that her AI-generated likeness could be exploited for unauthorized content.
Even as Evans steadily emerges as an increasingly unsavory character, Holmes herself remains a blank slate and deeply inscrutable. Does she have any idea what he is doing on her behalf? Does she actively approve of these bizarre public-relations maneuvers? Is he ruthlessly exploiting her vulnerable legal and personal circumstances for his own gain, or are they collaborating toward a shared objective—whether reputational, financial, or otherwise? The documentary offers a kaleidoscopic array of evidence supporting competing interpretations, leaving open the distinct possibility that even if Holmes is being subordinated in the relationship, she may be entirely content with that dynamic.
What is truly extraordinary about the creative partnership between Fielder and Oppenheim is the optical-illusion-like layers of constructed “truth” embedded in the project. Beneath the film’s harrowing close-ups capturing microexpressions and calculated pauses, there is a stark gulf between what Holmes and Evans explicitly say, what they actually do, and what they plan to execute next, such as rumors of launching a Theranos successor project under the name Haemanthus. Running parallel to this is Fielder’s own well-documented history as an artistic provocateur—a faux-earnest architect of awkwardness who will go to virtually any lengths to actualize a conceptual framework, all while maintaining a stone-cold, deadpan expression through the most absurd scenarios imaginable.
Knowing Fielder’s body of work makes it impossible to take his own sincerity entirely at face value. Several moments throughout the documentary prompt active speculation regarding whether there is a palpable, strange sexual chemistry flickering between him and Holmes, and whether Fielder might actually lean into it. If he were to cross that boundary, viewers are left to debate whether it would stem from genuine human connection, sophisticated performance art, or whether Fielder has entirely dissolved the barrier separating the two concepts.
Ultimately, the documentary’s most revealing moments are those that feel entirely off-script for every participant involved: a fleeting microexpression of exhaustion, an unexpected word choice dropped into an otherwise rehearsed statement, or a quiet series of territorial gestures exchanged over a bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects willingly invited cameras into their private lives to be watched, yet there are only a handful of fleeting instances where they genuinely seem to forget the lens is pointed at them. Those rare flashes offer the clearest insight into their actual reality, however murky that reality remains. And that lingering ambiguity appears to be both the central point and the driving irony behind the film’s evocative title.
You Can See Everything succeeds in elevating Nathan Fielder’s reputation far beyond that of a mere master of cringe humor, revealing flashes of genuine auteur genius. The resulting story feels almost fateful in its ability to showcase his unique creative gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities of how compromised human beings interact under the glaring spotlight of public infamy. Even when an overarching narrative concept is massive in scale, the documentary proves that it is the smallest, most mundane details that ultimately matter the most. In a film that explicitly promises viewers that they can see everything, the ultimate takeaway is that the burden remains entirely on the audience to look closer—and even then, what we think we see might shift entirely depending on the light in which it is viewed.