by Eric Francisco
“So it’s about Elizabeth Holmes?” my brother-in-law asked me. “Why would I watch that hack?” He had a point. Over a steakhouse dinner on Saturday night, I was struggling to explain why I was champing at the bit to see You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s latest documentary about the Theranos fraudster. While munching ribeye with millennial guys in their early forties, whose obligations as suburban fathers have made months pass without us meeting up, it was clear that Fielder’s work was in their blindspots.
But even if you’ve never come across The Rehearsal, and you, too, are baffled how a three-hour documentary has any buzz, here it is: Go see You Can See Everything. Right now, if possible. In a year full of great movies (and good documentaries!), it might yet be the best film of the year.
The film, co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime) is, ostensibly, about Elizabeth Holmes’s final days of freedom. In 2022, she was sentenced to eleven years in prison for defrauding investors of her medical start-up Theranos. Her rise and subsequent fall was a global phenomenon. But over an unbelievable three hours, it morphs into something that defies description.
Fielder—who built his comedic artistry on staging elaborate acts of deception, either to better understand how we think, rouse a laugh, or both—grapples with the idea that he, too, could be swayed by an omega-level bullshitter. We’ll keep it light on spoilers, but a key part of the movie rests on a quote Holmes gave the New York Times in 2023: “They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created.”
You may already know about Elizabeth Holmes. How she invented a miracle machine that she alleged could perform hundreds of tests with a single drop of blood. How it was a big fat lie. Hollywood has made dozens of documentaries about Holmes’s fall, including a cottage industry of YouTube videos and a Hulu series, The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried in an Emmy-winning performance. With that much exposure and her sentence decided, one might assume no one needs to hear about Holmes ever again.
Enter: Nathan Fielder. His rise in the public eye began in 2013 with his Comedy Central series Nathan For You, a show that, ironically, saw Fielder parade as a third-rate consultant who cooked up schemes for actual small businesses. (If you remember “Dumb Starbucks,” that was him.) Over the last thirteen years, Fielder cultivated a singular reputation for a sort of comedic nonfiction. If all the world’s a stage, Fielder will create an intricate replica to find the optimal place to launch a pie into someone’s face. Coupled with his deadpan delivery and ineptitude at social cues, a vibe once described as anti-comedy before it was cringe, his work relishes in the sheer implausibility of reality as it unfolds in front of him. Truly, cameras and live mics are not a deterrent from people revealing their true selves.
These ingredients made his HBO series The Rehearsal must-watch TV previously, in which Fielder’s absurd lengths to stage elaborate “rehearsals” for people facing a challenge in their lives was both an unusually productive form of exposure therapy and a punchline. You Can See Everything doesn’t have the same go-for-broke chaos as Nathan For You, nor are any of its staged renditions meant to draw out laughter like in The Rehearsal. But when your subject is Elizabeth Holmes—and her partner, entrepreneur Billy Evans, with whom they have two children—you keep the cameras rolling and see what happens.
So, that’s why it’s delicious that Nathan Fielder, of all people, not a journalist nor an accomplished documentarian, was approached for the project in the first place. Did Holmes think Fielder, a comedian by trade, would take it easy on her? At one point, Holmes even claims to be unfamiliar with Fielder beyond a single Nathan For You segment. We can’t look into the eyes of Holmes in that moment, but we’re inspired to wonder if she saw someone willing to tell her story, her way. Still, Fielder’s search for the answer to Why me? is just the beginning. Whether you know Fielder’s style or not, it’s impossible not to recognize that the tension is simply: Can this man be swayed? Will he?
I am admittedly struggling to paint the transcendence of You Can See Everything without giving away its complete endgame. The second half of the film is, without spoiling, a complete game changer. For now, the best I can do is to say that yes, You Can See Everything is a film with Elizabeth Holmes, and about Elizabeth Holmes. But it becomes apparent it’s about so much more. You truly have to see everything for yourself.
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