Elizabeth Holmes leans over a kitchen counter in soft afternoon light, smiling at something off camera, and across the room Nathan Fielder sits in a pair of headphones with the expression of a man who is not sure whether he is being lied to. That is most of what you need to know about “You Can See Everything”, and it is what the new trailer from A24 leans on. The documentary, directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Holmes and her partner Billy Evans from the weeks before she reported to federal prison, and A24 releases it in theaters on October 16th.
The premise, as A24 puts it, is that thirty-four days before she was sent to prison, the disgraced founder of Theranos invited a skeptical film crew to document her every move, and what started as an intimate portrait turned into a three-year journey. The film premiered as a secret screening at Telluride on September 6th, where audiences reportedly had to surrender their phones at the door, and it has since collected the kind of reviews most documentaries never see. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “You Can See Everything” and for what the trailer reveals about how it was made.
That is most of what you need to know about “You Can See Everything”, and it is what the new trailer from A24 leans on.”
The trailer runs about two and a half minutes, and the first thing to notice is its shape. It is framed in the boxy 4:3 ratio of old television, which is an unusual choice for a theatrical release and a telling one for this pair of directors, because it makes the footage feel less like cinema and more like evidence. There is very little narration and almost no explanation. Instead it cuts between Holmes at home, tight close-ups of the people around her, a child’s bedroom seen through the bars of a crib, a long walk on a beach and Fielder listening on headphones, while a sequence of pull quotes promises something “weirder and wilder” than anyone expects.
Fielder’s presence is the story inside the story. The directors have said they originally planned to keep him behind the camera, and that his exchanges with Holmes and Evans became so strange that leaving him out was no longer possible. For anyone who knows “Nathan for You” or HBO’s “The Rehearsal”, that is both exciting and a little alarming. Fielder has built a career on putting real people into constructed situations and watching what they do, and Holmes built a company on a machine that never did what she said it did. The trailer is careful not to say which of them is running the experiment.
Oppenheim is the other half of that equation, and he is easy to overlook next to a name like Fielder’s. His documentaries “Some Kind of Heaven” and “Spermworld” are both about people living inside a slightly unreal version of their own lives, shot with a polish that makes them look almost staged even when they are not. It is a style, frankly, that seems made for this subject. The soft light, the careful framing and the long silences in the trailer all feel like his fingerprints as much as Fielder’s.
The team behind the camera is worth naming, too, because the trailer’s look is so specific. David Bolen shot it, Adam Locke-Norton cut it, and Ari Balouzian wrote the score, which in the trailer is little more than a low, uneasy hum under the dialogue. Oppenheim, for his part, has since moved into scripted work with “Primetime”, an A24 feature starring Robert Pattinson, and it is tempting to see this film as the bridge between his two careers, a documentary that plays, at times, like a thriller.
The project itself started with a tip. Oppenheim and Fielder heard through a friend that Holmes was looking for someone to document her life, and Fielder, who had read John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood”, was curious about the version of her that disappeared from public view after the verdict. Holmes and Evans let the crew live with them through those last thirty-four days. A24 greenlit the film without a deadline or any obligation to finish it, which says a lot about how uncertain everyone was about where it would go.
The facts underneath all of this are not in dispute. Holmes was convicted of defrauding Theranos investors, acquitted on the charges involving patients, and reported to prison in May 2023 to serve a sentence of more than eleven years. The story has already been told several ways, in Carreyrou’s book, in Alex Gibney’s documentary “The Inventor”, and in Hulu’s “The Dropout” with Amanda Seyfried, while a feature starring Jennifer Lawrence was developed and eventually dropped. What none of those had was Holmes herself, on camera, over years, with nothing obviously to gain. That is what this film is selling, and the trailer makes you want to know what she was hoping to get out of it.
There are real ethical questions sitting under a project like this, and it would be strange not to raise them. A documentary built on intimate access to a convicted fraudster can easily become a rehabilitation campaign, especially one made with her cooperation and her family in the frame. The trailer’s quiet, sympathetic imagery, Holmes laughing in the kitchen, Holmes in glasses in a parked car, could be read that way. The critics who have seen it suggest the film is much more slippery than that, but it is a fair thing to watch for.
The reviews so far are about as strong as reviews get. The film currently holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes from its first ten critics and a 95 on Metacritic, and Owen Gleiberman at Variety wrote that it overlaps reality, performance, deception and mental illness until it brings you into the enigmatic space where all those things meet. The pull quotes in the trailer go further, with lines like “one hell of a ride” and “I may think about this movie for the rest of my life”, though the trailer does not say who wrote them.
One practical detail is worth knowing before you plan a trip to the theater. “You Can See Everything” runs 174 minutes, just short of three hours, which is enormous for a documentary and suggests the film is not in any hurry to reach a verdict. The trailer, at barely a seventieth of that, gives away almost nothing about the structure, and it may be the right call, because the whole appeal here seems to be not knowing what kind of film you are watching until you are deep inside it.
That is the real pitch. “You Can See Everything” is a title that sounds like a promise of transparency, attached to a woman whose entire story is about what could not be seen, and made by a comedian whose entire career is about the gap between what people say and what they do. On the evidence of two and a half minutes of footage, that tension is exactly where the film lives, and October 16th cannot come fast enough.
What Do You Think? Is Nathan Fielder the right person to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, or does his style risk turning a real fraud into a comedy bit? Should a film made with Holmes’s full cooperation be trusted, or watched with suspicion? And are you ready to sit through almost three hours of it?
See you on the next binge!
