Nathan Fielder’s movie on Elizabeth Holmes absolutely lives up to the hype

Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Turns Access Into a Question Mark

Sandego.net – Elizabeth Holmes appears before cameras again in “You Can See Everything,” but this time the image-making itself becomes one of the film’s most unsettling subjects. The new documentary, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows the former Theranos founder during the period just before she began her federal prison sentence in 2023.

The project arrives in US theaters on Friday after an unusually secretive rollout. A surprise trailer released last month ignited intense interest, with early viewers calling the film a major achievement and raising the possibility that it could break through in awards conversations normally closed to documentaries.

Its attention-grabbing premise is rooted in extraordinary access. Fielder and Oppenheim are allowed into Holmes’ family life at a particularly consequential moment, recording her interactions with her partner, William “Billy” Evans, and observing a household confronting imminent separation. The filmmakers even include a scene of Evans showering nude, an example of how little distance the camera maintains from its subjects.

A digital version of Holmes

One remarkable sequence centers on a session in which Holmes is photographed, scanned and digitally captured more than 200 times. The goal is to create versions of her that could later appear in video, holographic presentations or artificial-intelligence applications while she is incarcerated.

That effort has a commercial dimension. Holmes and Evans, who have two children together, are working on a healthcare startup they describe as “Theranos 2.0.” A programmable version of Holmes could potentially be used for business presentations or other public-facing work while she remains unavailable in person.

Yet the scene is not presented as a simple startup exercise. Holmes becomes emotional while participating, reflecting on the cost of allowing her likeness to circulate so broadly after years of public scrutiny.

“I have a weird history with being on camera,” she says while crying.

The contradiction gives the documentary much of its force: a person whose public identity became central to an enormous fraud case is now helping construct new, potentially limitless forms of that identity.

A filmmaker and subject built for uncertainty

Fielder’s involvement makes the film an especially unusual match of director and subject. Through “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” he has developed a screen persona drawn to elaborate plans, social discomfort and narratives that shift as viewers look more closely. His work regularly exposes the machinery behind a situation, while also making audiences wonder how much of what they are seeing has been shaped by him.

“You Can See Everything” uses that sensibility to examine Holmes, who seems to offer different explanations of herself at different moments. Evans describes her as unusual. Her father suggests she has been harmed by influential men around her. Another revealing passage, involving Holmes’ response to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First” routine, raises the possibility that she may be on the spectrum and may not recognize how other people interpret what she says.

Those possibilities do not resolve the central issue. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors through Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded, and was sentenced in 2022 to more than 11 years in prison. She has been approved to transfer to a halfway house in 2027.

The documentary instead asks viewers to sit with competing ideas about intent, performance and self-deception. Fielder at one point considers whether Holmes could be the most manipulative person ever to live, but the movie’s larger interest lies in how difficult it can be to separate calculated deception from the stories people tell themselves.

“The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true. So what is the reality?” Holmes says in the film.

Images that refuse to flatter

Visually, the documentary appears designed to make closeness uncomfortable. Holmes and Fielder are frequently filmed at extreme proximity, leaving sweat, wrinkles, blemishes and other ordinary details impossible to ignore. The result can be strikingly beautiful while also deliberately unattractive, as though both people are being inspected under harsh laboratory conditions.

The directors also leave elements of production visible. Crew members and boom microphones enter the frame, undercutting any expectation that the documentary is an invisible window onto reality. That openness about construction fits Fielder’s ongoing interest in artifice, while complicating the audience’s confidence in every supposedly candid moment.

Oppenheim brings his own recent momentum to the collaboration after releasing “Primetime” under the A24 banner last month. Together, the directors create a film that moves between observation and recreation, reality and performance, without offering a neat line between them.

For viewers, the attraction of “You Can See Everything” is not simply its access to one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous figures. It is the uncomfortable realization that access does not automatically produce clarity. More footage, more images and even a digital duplicate of Holmes may leave the essential question unresolved: who is speaking, who is performing, and whether the difference can ever be fully known.