You Can See Everything (2026)
Directed by: Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Premise: A documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Filmmaker Nathan Fielder lives with Holmes and her husband Billy Evans in the weeks leading up to Holmes’ prison term for fraud.
What Works: You Can See Everything is ostensibly a profile of Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans but it’s really an exploration of the limits of documentary filmmaking especially in cases of embedded reporting. Elizabeth Holmes is the ideal subject for this angle. She was convicted of fraud and Holmes has been described as a pathological liar. Holmes’ colorful history, tenuous regard for truth, and her awkward affectation make her a fascinating subject. Nothing in the film can be taken at face value. At every moment throughout the documentary, filmmaker Nathan Fielder and the audience have to parse the intricacies of Holmes’ statements, analyze her body language, and account for her agenda. Billy Evans gradually emerges as an important figure in this story and his relationship to Holmes is complicated. Evans’ behavior and the nonverbal reactions to Evans by Holmes and her parents suggest new understandings of Holmes that might be true, might be deliberate misdirection, or could be audience projection. Holmes and Evans proclaim that they are approaching this documentary with radical honesty (hence the title) but it is really the illusion of transparency. Documentary filmmakers must always choose moments to retain or discard and they are faced with the problem of performance. People may act differently when they are on camera. With subjects who are as suspicious as Holmes and Evans, viewers are led to second-guess everyone’s motives as well as their own judgments. You Can See Everything becomes a meta-text on documentary filmmaking but it goes a step further by linking in docudramas. Our fictional entertainment is not siloed from journalism; each form exists in conversation with the other. This is especially relevant to the true crime genre of which Holmes’ story is a part. The film takes a turn in the second half, becoming deliberately fictional and in doing so asks the audience to consider what behind-the-scenes considerations shape our movies and television shows and how dramatic programs shape our understanding of reality.
What Doesn’t: You Can See Everything exists in a larger context of coverage about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The film does not offer much exposition about Holmes and her crimes so viewers who are not familiar with her story will be at a disadvantage especially with a subject that is already so opaque. (The 2019 documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley does a fine job covering this story.) The Theranos story was dramatized in the 2022 Hulu series The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. The Dropout becomes an indispensable part of You Can See Everything, so much so that it is essential for viewers to see the dramatic series prior to watching this documentary.
Bottom Line: You Can See Everything is a fascinating mix of documentary and dramatization.. It has to be understood as part of a larger body of work about Elizabeth Holmes and the film merits multiple viewings to take it all in. You Can See Everything also captures something essential about our relationship to media in this era.
Episode: #1124 (November 1, 2026)