You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, pivots on a question that runs through the entire film. In a charged face-to-face, co-director Nathan Fielder looks Holmes in the eye and asks, “Are you being real right now?” The moment, already widely discussed before release, sets the tone for a three-hour examination of performance, perception and truth.
You Can See Everything opens with intimate 2023 access
The first half unfolds in 2023, when Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim embedded with Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their two young children in the weeks before her prison term for fraud. Working out of a beachfront rental, Fielder presses at Holmes’s serene, impenetrable confidence while Evans hovers protectively.
The exchanges are tense, sometimes darkly funny, and often disorienting. Viewers watch Holmes, with apparent sincerity, claim she has never lied and maintain that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests, even as Fielder challenges her on the difference between can perform and could theoretically perform.
When Evans tells Fielder, “I know what you’re feeling,” the comedian’s quick reply, “No, you don’t,” lands as a rare moment of blunt clarity in a fog of evasions. Taken alone, this claustrophobic opening might have stood as a curiosity of Silicon Valley lore.
Instead, the film kept rolling. After its September announcement and a spoiler-averse rollout, the documentary delivered the most successful opening weekend at the domestic box office for a nonfiction feature in more than two decades, according to industry figures.
A second act that expands the form of You Can See Everything
In the back half, which picks up in 2025 after Holmes has served time, You Can See Everything becomes something bolder. The film has earned near-unanimous critical praise, with an exceptionally high Rotten Tomatoes score and a top-tier Letterboxd rating.
It is even seen as a potential breakthrough contender for best picture, an honor no documentary has achieved. The pivot arrives with a jolt: Fielder brings in Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for portraying Holmes in the 2022 Hulu series The Dropout.
At first, her presence reads as a clever loop, an actor watching the real person watch her dramatization. Soon, it deepens into a Fielder-style investigation of emotion through constructed scenarios.
Drawing on the methodology of his HBO series The Rehearsal, Fielder stages escalating reenactments, placing Seyfried inside meticulously built replicas of earlier scenes to examine what was said, felt and assumed.
Seyfried toggles between defending The Dropout as fiction grounded in fact and questioning whether its liberties crossed ethical lines. The film captures her negotiating responsibilities to the real Holmes, to a character, to storytelling and to factual record, revising those stances as each reconstruction adds context.
Tech mythmaking, manipulation and a 2020s archetype
The Dropout was widely regarded as the strongest of the 2022 spate of tech scandal dramas. Here, the new film arrives alongside fresh attempts to parse the tech era, from awards-season dramas to sprawling nonfiction portraits, many of which can feel outpaced by the speed and absurdity of their subjects.
By neither binding itself to strict representation nor to conventional journalism, You Can See Everything locates what Fielder might call an emotional truth of the moment. Evans emerges as a distinctly current figure: a self-styled innovator whose social media diet and ambition shape a restless techno-optimism.
With a “LASERS” license plate, a fixation on a new Theranos “device,” and a workspace at WeWork, he pursues a Theranos 2.0 as the film carefully exposes the incentives and loyalties driving the project. The filmmakers peel back layers of their own process too, from Evans’s financial arrangement related to the production to the way selective inclusion and omission calibrate the viewer’s sense of reality.
What counts as true depends on what is shown. That skepticism resonates in an AI-saturated media environment where images, voices and narratives are routinely manipulated.
Breaking the spell of documentary omniscience
Fielder’s career has consistently inverted assumptions about reality on screen. Reality television openly manufactures moments, yet documentaries still often receive a default presumption of objectivity.
The title You Can See Everything winks at that expectation. You cannot, the film insists. Every frame carries choice.
That skepticism resonates in an AI-saturated media environment where images, voices and narratives are routinely manipulated. “Are you being real right now?” could just as easily apply to celebrity photographs, geopolitically charged memes or the latest viral animal clip.
The film suggests that collective viewing, with all its friction and debate, is one way to navigate the hall of mirrors. Certainty may be out of reach, but the work of testing claims, interrogating frames and comparing perspectives remains essential.
Leaving the theater, the unease lingers, along with a bracing directive: you may never fully know, but you still have to look closely. For more on how contemporary art grapples with perception and truth, see Diaries of a Primitive Man: A Week in Art and Ideas.