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Nathan Fielder Moved In With Elizabeth Holmes. ‘You Can See Everything’ Is What Came Out.
Shot in secret over three years, the nearly three-hour A24 documentary from Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follows the Theranos founder through her final weeks of freedom, and into something much stranger. For three years, almost no one knew that Nathan Fielder was living in a guest house in Del Mar, California, filming Elizabeth Holmes from morning to night. The result is “You Can See Everything,” a documentary Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim that A24 releases in theaters on October 16. It is one of the most talked-about films of the fall festival season, and possibly the strangest. A Secret Screening at Telluride The film was unveiled without warning on September 6 at the Telluride Film Festival, at a surprise screening where phones were banned. It went on to play the New York Film Festival on October 1. Its premise is simple to describe and hard to believe. In the spring of 2023, Holmes, the founder of the collapsed blood-testing company Theranos, was weeks away from reporting to prison to begin a sentence of more than 11 years for fraud. She and her partner, Billy Evans, agreed to let Fielder and Oppenheim film them at home with their two young children during her final 34 days of freedom. The access was close to total. Interviews took place in bedrooms and bathrooms. When Fielder asks Holmes whether she is being authentic with him, she answers, “I’m always being real.” Who Is Directing Whom? What began as a portrait of a woman about to lose her freedom became, in the filmmakers’ telling, a three-year descent. Fielder, best known for “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” becomes a character in his own film, openly questioning whether Holmes and Evans are giving him unfiltered access or carefully managing what he sees. After Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023, she largely disappears from the screen. Evans becomes the filmmakers’ main link to her, until that relationship, too, breaks down as production nears its end. The film also uses reenactments featuring an actress whose identity was kept under wraps at the premiere. The filmmakers themselves still seem rattled. “I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder told the Associated Press. “I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through.” Oppenheim said that “every person who worked on this movie was going through a similar cognitive dissonance.” Two Filmmakers Obsessed With Performance The pairing makes sense. Fielder has spent his career building elaborate scenarios that expose the gap between how people present themselves and who they are. Oppenheim, who directed “Primetime,” has made a specialty of documentaries about people living inside their own carefully constructed realities. Holmes may be the ultimate subject for both of them. Her entire public story turned on a performance: the black turtlenecks, the deep voice and a technology that never worked the way she said it did. A film that asks whether she is ever not performing was almost inevitable. A film made by the person living in her guest house was not. The Rise and Fall Behind the Film Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at 19. She promised a revolution in medicine: a device that could run a wide range of tests from a few drops of blood drawn from a fingertip. Investors poured in money, and at its peak the company was valued at roughly $9 billion, making Holmes a magazine-cover fixture and the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. The technology never worked as promised. A 2015 investigation by The Wall Street Journal exposed the company’s problems, and Theranos dissolved in 2018. In January 2022, a federal jury convicted Holmes of defrauding investors, and she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. By then her story had already become entertainment, from the bestselling book “Bad Blood” to “The Dropout,” which won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy for playing her. “You Can See Everything” is the first time Holmes herself has handed over the camera, and the first time anyone has seen what her life looked like from the inside. Inside the House The film opens in the rented beachfront home where Holmes, Evans and their children spent her last weeks of freedom, trying to squeeze in as much family time as possible. Fielder originally planned to stay behind the camera. But the interactions in the house grew so unusual that he ended up at the center of the film, sitting across from Holmes in long conversations shot in extreme close-up. Some scenes play almost like comedy. In one, Fielder shows Holmes Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine. She says she has never seen it, and she cannot make sense of it. In others, the tone darkens. Watching scenes from “The Dropout,” Holmes becomes visibly upset. Pressed on whether Theranos’s machines actually worked, she retreats into careful semantics rather than give a straight answer. The cameras were also rolling around the time Holmes gave her first major interview in years to The New York Times in May 2023. In the film, she and Evans dispute some of the quotes the paper published. The Times has stood by its reporting. According to early reports from Telluride, the documentary also reveals that Holmes and Evans were planning to launch a new, improved version of Theranos. Billy Evans Takes Center Stage The film does not end when Holmes goes to prison. It keeps going for roughly two more years, and its focus shifts increasingly to Evans, a hotel heir who met Holmes after the Theranos scandal broke. Critics who have seen it say his behavior on camera, including some questionable remarks about Holmes’s parents, becomes the film’s most unsettling thread. Gregory Ellwood of The Playlist suggested that Evans “may have walked right into his own self-made character assassination.” Late in the film, a mysterious figure from Holmes’s past also enters the story. The filmmakers have asked critics not to reveal who it is. Early Reactions Critics have struggled to categorize the film. Variety described it as a “reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus,” while Deadline pointed to the unprecedented access the filmmakers secured. The Playlist called it “remarkable and at times brilliant,” praising reenactments that blend seamlessly into the documentary footage, though Ellwood questioned whether the film needed to be quite so long. Even the people who made it say they have not reached a verdict. Fielder has said that no one on the team, however experienced, “could reach a consensus on what was happening in the house.” Holmes, still serving her sentence, has promoted the film’s trailer through an X account run on her behalf. Whether “You Can See Everything” finally shows the real Elizabeth Holmes, or simply captures her most elaborate performance yet, may be the question audiences carry out of theaters when it opens October 16. If the filmmakers are to be believed, they are still trying to answer it themselves.