Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything chronicles Elizabeth Holmes shortly before her prison sentence, earning a 100 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its release following a screening at the Telluride Film Festival.
The disgraced Theranos founder invited documentary filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her rented beach house in Del Mar in 2023. The visit took place exactly 34 days before she was scheduled to report to a Texas prison to begin serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding Theranos investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Holmes had been sentenced in November 2022. Out of that unexpected invitation came You Can See Everything,
a project that has drawn rapturous critical praise following its unannounced screening at the Telluride Film Festival on Sept. 6.
Rotten Tomatoes Acclaim and Critical Reception
Ahead of its theatrical release on Friday, You Can See Everything earned a perfect critics score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 37 reviews.
Mashable critic Kristy Puchko called the movie a masterwork of interrogation,
while Rolling Stone critic David Fear described the experience of watching it by writing that viewers will likely have no idea what they have just seen besides that it is unabashedly brilliant. The Hollywood Reporter critic Angie Han noted that the project begins as an intimate portrait of a disingenuous scammer before evolving into something wilder and less predictable. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman characterized it as a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus,
and Guardian critic Adrian Horton awarded the film a five-out-of-five score.
There is something extremely satisfying in watching Fielder’s sharp angles tangle with Holmes’s disposition of guileless warmth, a strange and compelling chemistry building within a reality distortion field.
Adrian Horton, Guardian
Inside the Del Mar Beach House Meetings
The film captures Fielder attempting to interview a subject who refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. In WBUR’s review of the film, the dynamic is described as a master manipulator meeting her match, with Fielder playing the straight man against Holmes’s unyielding eye contact and insistence that she has never told a lie in her adult life.
During their interactions, Holmes uses intricate wordplay to justify her past statements. When Fielder references Abbott and Costello’s classic comedy routine Who’s on First?
to illustrate the circular nature of their conversation, Holmes stares blankly at the YouTube video on a screen, claiming she has never heard of it. Her partner, Billy Evans, appears in the film alongside her to support her perspective.
She just thinks differently.
Billy Evans, partner
Evans and Holmes are shown attempting to orchestrate a comeback branded as Theranos 2.0, this time centered around lasers. The documentary contrasts this ongoing ambition with the magnitude of her past fraud, which previously snared seasoned business figures and political leaders including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Henry Kissinger, and Gen. James Mattis.
Structural Shift and Prison Arrival
Nearly an hour and a half into the 174-minute runtime, Holmes officially reports to the Texas federal prison camp to begin her sentence. At this juncture, the movie shifts stylistically, folding in on itself with a prankish, deconstructive spirit comparable to Orson Welles’s F for Fake.
The second half of the documentary re-examines previously shown footage from fresh angles, incorporating expert perspectives and a surprise guest star. Directors Fielder and Oppenheim utilize locked-down tripod shots and tight close-ups throughout, juxtaposing direct observation against a cultural backdrop built from billboard photographs, fake social media accounts, artificial intelligence chatbots, and Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal of Holmes in the Hulu drama series The Dropout.