Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything is like a cinematic Rorschach test. Between its showcase of what the two documentarians do best and its subject, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, it is as epic as documentary filmmaking — hell, filmmaking in general — gets. This may seem like too heavy of a burden for any film to carry, but it genuinely will tell you a whole lot about how you see the world.
In 2023, Fielder and Oppenheim were invited to document the final month of Elizabeth Holmes’ life before her over 11-year prison sentence began in May of that year. While in Holmes’ and her partner Billy Evans’ rented home in San Diego, the crew captured fascinating footage of the two of them making designs for a new startup company based around the same idea Theranos brought to market before ultimately being revealed as a fraud. You see how truly captivated Holmes is by the concept of a device which can almost instantly test specimen samples for a variety of diseases and conditions. However, the actual word “can” becomes a major point of contention, both in Fielder’s conversations with Holmes and in the film’s perspective on what was promised to investors and the public. Can the device do what we want it to do now? Or is the can a theoretical can to be kicked down the road?
Anyone familiar with Fielder’s work can probably imagine how some of these conversations might go. His trademark deadpan-yet-engaged persona is flawlessly applied here, and it’s just as fascinating as anything else in the film to see that persona crack as the story shifts and changes. One of the best scenes in the film — and there are many over the shockingly breezy three-hour runtime — involves Fielder trying to make Holmes understand his confusion at her seeming evasiveness by having her and Evans watch the classic Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” As I was watching it, I thought that sequence would have been the intellectual and comedic peak of the film. Oh, how wrong I was.
Around the very middle of the film, the focus of Fielder and Oppenheim’s inquiry shifts, and so too do the power dynamics at play. It would be a major spoiler to reveal what that new focus is, but the rabbit hole that is then dug into is one of the most satisfyingly tricky rabbit holes in any documentary ever made. I’d be willing to bet there’ll be large portions of the audience convinced that certain scenes were staged because the film does turn into a true-life drama at a certain point. From my perspective however, it’s too ethically and intellectually juicy of a story to not be true. You literally can’t make this stuff up.
The filmmaking in general is fairly subtle in order to compliment and not upstage the wild nature of the events unfolding. Regardless, there are a number of moments of truly perfect editing by Adam Locke-Norton; the camera will rest on someone’s face for the exact right amount of time, a classic Nathan Fielder reaction shot will be tempered by something actually emotional, or an image from much earlier in the film will be called back to at just the right time for maximum thematic effect. Again, I wish I could get more granular as to what details of the story make for such great moments like these, but that would be to ruin the entire effect of the film. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I promise it will be even more interesting than it reads when you see it on the big screen. I wouldn’t say the film exactly flew by, but I was never bored, and I doubt very many viewers will be. | George Napper
