You Can See Everything arrives at the New York film festival as the season’s buzziest premiere, propelled by a viral minute of Nathan Fielder, the architect of The Rehearsal, staring inches from Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted Theranos founder. In the clip, Fielder asks, “Are you being real right now?” The moment hints at what follows, a feature-length confrontation with one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious figures, and the question of who is directing whom.
The film, co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, landed in New York on Wednesday after weeks of speculation that the comedian had spent years filming a clandestine project with Holmes. Interest was intense and tickets were scarce, a reflection of the irresistible setup: television’s consummate illusionist in a room with a symbol of corporate deceit.
You Can See Everything and the Holmes-Evans experiment
Those who secured seats found the anticipation well placed. The documentary is stranger and more revealing than its premise suggests, a dizzying psychological maze that pits styles and agendas against one another. Early on, Billy Evans, Holmes’s husband and business partner, tells the camera that the best way for the public to understand her is to allow unfiltered access to their daily life.
The statement, delivered as the couple lounges on a playroom floor, signals the film’s central tension between openness and control over a three-hour running time that seldom loosens its grip. The New York premiere joins a wave of culture events filling the city, echoing the busy calendar described during New York art week.
Without giving away pivotal turns, the film thrives on discovery. Viewers familiar with Fielder’s body of work will expect the ground to shift, and it does, repeatedly. The filmmakers enter the Holmes-Evans household in 2023, when Holmes, convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy and facing an 11-year sentence, is seeking to reassert her story while raising two young children.
Their choice of collaborators is notable. Oppenheim brings a heightened visual language of saturated color, tight framing and slow, probing zooms. Fielder supplies blunt, uncomfortable inquiry, the kind that erodes social cushioning and forces characters to define themselves on camera.
Documentary style and Silicon Valley mythology
The pairing yields a documentary that moves like a thriller and reverberates like a drama, all while dismantling certainties in plain view. Oppenheim’s close-quarters style isolates behavior until it becomes its own suspense engine. Fielder’s sharp interrogations collide with Holmes’s presentation of unguarded warmth, generating a dissonant chemistry that the film continuously interrogates.
The result is a portrait of performance and counter-performance in which confidence, sincerity and strategy are nearly indistinguishable. Holmes’s rise and fall remains one of federal prosecutors’ most prominent cases against a Silicon Valley startup founder, and the film circles that legacy without ever fully resolving it.
As the conversations deepen, the dynamic between filmmaker and subject grows more volatile and self-reflexive. Questions that many have long wanted to ask Holmes, and Evans as well, are put to them, and then pressed further. The film acknowledges the oddity at its core, as Fielder points out the peculiarity of entrusting a comedian renowned for staging dubious business ventures with a project meant to clarify one of the 2010s’ most infamous fraud sagas.
By its end, You Can See Everything has delivered on its audacious promise. It shows more of Elizabeth Holmes than most would expect while leaving the essence of her story unsettled. The film argues that access does not equal understanding, and that the camera can illuminate and distort in equal measure.
The paradox is invigorating rather than deflating. The experience is bracing, provocative and, in its insistence on ambiguity, unforgettable. As with many recent screen portraits of controversial business leaders that have captured attention well beyond Hollywood, including other depictions of tech culture on streaming platforms, its impact seems likely to ripple far outside the festival circuit.