For a few minutes on Wednesday night, the New York Film Festival crowd watched Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced ex-CEO and founder of the medical start-up Theranos, and her partner, Billy Evans, as they seemingly went about their lives at a San Diego beach house. Evans was on the phone, insisting that nobody really understood Holmes; she sat next to him, her expression vacant, and patted her baby on the back. Moments later, she was talking with someone on her computer, her AirPods in and eyes unblinking. Then, suddenly, the camera cut to a third person—the comedian and director Nathan Fielder, who was observing from the side—prompting huge laughter from the crowd.
Honestly, the reveal wasn’t that funny. Fielder was just standing there—not saying anything, not making a face, just existing in the room. But his appearance acknowledged something obvious: We were not watching a sober, straightforward accounting of Holmes’s domestic life in 2023, days before she was set to report to a federal prison on counts of defrauding investors in her company. To his fans, Fielder has cultivated a reputation as modern culture’s foremost stenographer of strange situations. Somehow, he had scored extensive access to a notorious fabulist whose moon-faced staring and affected baritone had made her a national punch line. And now, in You Can See Everything, the documentary that emerged out of the time he spent with Holmes, we were about to see just how weird this woman really was; the anticipation was unbearable, hence the laughter.
You Can See Everything, made in collaboration with the director Lance Oppenheim, has gathered intense interest since its surprise reveal last month at the Telluride Film Festival. The standby line for tickets Wednesday stretched long and wide outside Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, where the film would be playing; a publicist told me she’d heard that someone had been out there since 2:30 a.m. Inside, the director Noah Baumbach and the novelist Rachel Kushner took seats. The screening was the only one of the festival, and the last time the movie would be shown publicly ahead of its theatrical release, on October 16. Although some detailed reports about the movie had popped up after its screening at Telluride, Fielder and Oppenheim had apparently asked that crowd to not give away too much, and they did the same in a post-screening Q&A at NYFF.
I’ll do my best. (You’ll have to find out for yourself why the movie earned an R rating for “some graphic nudity.”) In some ways, it’s easier to talk about what the movie isn’t. You Can See Everything lacks the architecture of Fielder’s best-known shows, where he establishes and solves an elaborate problem of his own making. Think of the second season of HBO’s The Rehearsal, during which Fielder wonders why airline pilots have a hard time communicating directly with one another—and, in his exploratory process, ends up becoming a certified pilot himself. In projects such as that show, and Comedy Central’s Nathan for You, he inhabits a quasi-fictional “Nathan Fielder” persona, who is droll and almost uncomfortably literal—possibly neurodivergent, as explored in an episode on The Rehearsal.
What he’s doing in You Can See Everything is closer to journalism. The filming constituted Holmes’s first exposure to the media in seven years, and Fielder—amazingly, preposterously—was one of the few people on the planet (she also did an interview with The New York Times) in a position to chip away at some of Holmes’s self-evident fictions, a privilege he took seriously. He does not appear to be inhabiting a persona; initially, he told the New York audience, he wasn’t even supposed to appear on-screen. The documentary is filled with scenes in which Fielder deliberates with his collaborators about a potential line of inquiry, or aggressively presses Holmes or Evans in the hope of catching them fibbing about one of their many boisterous claims.
[Read: Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone]
Frustratingly for him, Holmes is a world-class prevaricator. She is a convicted felon, a newish mother, in a happy relationship—all positions that can transform how a person moves through the world, yet the facade never drops. Up close, the public stereotypes around her persona are largely confirmed. At one point she insists, with total sincerity, that not only is she always being honest, but she has never told a lie in her life. Hearing this, Fielder’s stoicism cracks; he’s as openly baffled as viewers may be. Faced with such willful obstinacy, he attempts a more indirect fact-finding mission, working his way backwards from some of Holmes’s contentions to understand how she distinguishes between a truth and a lie. For example, the documentary spends some time unpacking Theranos’s well-publicized claim that it had created a machine that could perform more than 1,000 diagnostic medical tests. To be clear: This was not true, at all, and was extensively debunked. But Fielder keeps nudging Holmes to clarify how she came to believe she was telling the truth.
In her eyes, Holmes slowly explains, the machine itself was theoretically capable of performing these tests, only the company hadn’t developed the actual tests. Again, to be clear: This is sophistry, like claiming you’ve invented a car that’s theoretically capable of driving at 10,000 miles an hour … only the necessary engine doesn’t exist, and you know it doesn’t exist. Fielder continues pushing, leading Holmes to quietly withdraw; she seems genuinely shell-shocked by the growing impossibility of justifying her position out loud. Inquisitive moments like these are seemingly the closest she comes to grasping that her reasoning doesn’t stack up. Meanwhile, Evans simmers with badly concealed irritation over Fielder’s skepticism. “I know what you’re feeling,” he interjects at the end of this long explanation, only for Fielder to respond, quickly and forcefully, “No, you don’t.”
This has been one of the recurring themes of Fielder’s work: the difficulty of really seeing inside someone else’s head, of authentically connecting with another person. His shows are filled with people who appear to have never thought through their worldview using their words—who, when they try, do such a bad job of it that Fielder can typically respond only with his trademark deadpan “Oh, okay” (a phrase that pops up in this film). In letting his subjects speak for themselves, he elicits the easy laugh at the obviously ridiculous, like a man on The Rehearsal who’s obsessed with numerology and won’t stop talking about how he crashed his Scion tC. But his works remind viewers that not all things under the sun abide by rationale and common sense. People are strange, generally. Some of them squirrel away in a cave of their own making for years and years, never exposing their beliefs to sunlight. Others are convinced they’ve got something special to share with the world—and, when they try to do so, slowly erect the circumstances of their own downfall.
Because it’s preposterous, really, that Holmes would attempt to convince the world of her fundamental authenticity by inviting Nathan Fielder, of all people, into her home. It’s like announcing a special guest at your local swimming class who turns out to be the shark from Jaws. But the director gives her a fair shake. It is possible to come away from this documentary with empathy for Elizabeth Holmes. By withholding his judgment, and making an earnest attempt to untangle her tortured justification for what easily scans as garden-variety chicanery, Fielder digs at something more interesting than whether she was knowingly lying about what Theranos could medically accomplish. He makes space for the possibility that someone can be so wrapped up in their bespoke logic that their actions, however destructive, essentially come from a place of innocence. In attempting to understand this, one’s empathy may easily be exploited; there are moments when the viewer may wonder whether Holmes is getting one over on him. (At some points, she appears to be openly flirting with him, but the thread is dropped.) Yet how can we possibly abandon the responsibility to make sense of one another?
[Read: You’ve never seen anything quite like The Rehearsal]
This is an emotional argument, not a legal one. Holmes’s actions had more consequences than just some failed investments; her chief scientist, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide over the stress of being deposed in a lawsuit. You Can See Everything is certainly not an apology tour. Yet to some people, the fact that Holmes has even the tiniest chance of rehabilitating her image, through her association with such a critically acclaimed humorist, will seem like a flagrant travesty. In modern America, incarceration is no longer the last word on the criminally liable; our culture is filled with plenty of scandalous figures who went to prison, said enough of the right things, and got right back to it once released. If you don’t think it’s possible for Holmes to leverage some of the goodwill this movie will incur into marketing Theranos 2.0—an oft-discussed project within You Can See Everything—then, as they say down South, bless your heart. (Evans, over the course of the film, openly monetizes his partner’s image, betting that having any exposure, even if negative, is better than disappearing entirely.)
In parts of the film, Fielder incorporates some of his familiar staging techniques, recreating some off-camera interactions with Holmes with the help of a famous actor whose first appearance prompted knowing applause. These sequences are less compelling than what we get from watching Holmes herself; the actor, though certainly talented, can’t re-create her intensity. In conversations, Fielder and the actor—who by now have both spent plenty of time studying Holmes—still can’t quite crack what is going on here. Is Holmes, somehow, a victim of conspiracy? Is she just the most manipulative woman alive? Could both be true, at the same time?
Viewers may decide for themselves; I found it plausible that Holmes still doesn’t comprehend what she did wrong. But though parts of the movie are unavoidably funny, the project is less explicitly comedic than you might expect, given Fielder’s previous work. At least that’s how I took it: Personally, I find nothing really amusing about the idea that people remain unknowable and morally unaccountable to anyone but themselves. During the screening’s Q&A, Fielder said he and Oppenheim had structured the movie so audiences will go on a discovery journey like theirs. In that sense, once the lights went up, I felt the way he did: at a loss for words to explain what I’d really learned from all of this, beyond a great, nervous confusion at the ongoing mystery of other people.