“Radical transparency.” That is the promise of You Can See Everything. Nathan Fielder made his name with comic, mind-bending television series like Nathan for You, The Rehearsal, and The Curse, which push the techniques of reality TV and documentary filmmaking to the extreme, stacking self-referential layers until they tip into absurdity. Having pioneered an aesthetic of translucent hyperreality on television, he now brings it to feature film with a three-hour documentary made with Lance Oppenheim.
The film’s subject is the infamous Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. Once hailed as one of the youngest “self-made” female billionaires ever, she was later convicted of defrauding investors over a blood-testing device that never worked as promised. She owes her investors $452 million and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The drama of the documentary comes from her complete denial that she wronged anyone.
In fact, she insists she has never deceived anyone in her entire adult life, and that the testing device works. Believing the media narrative against her is biased, Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, invite Fielder into their home in the hope that radical transparency will change the public’s opinion of her. The first half of the film takes place at their beachside cottage near San Diego in 2023, the month before she went to prison. The second half picks up two years later, with Holmes behind bars at a federal prison in Texas.
Anthropologists argue over whether it is more methodologically sound to observe from a distance or to immerse yourself in the lives of the people you study. Fielder leans toward immersion. He makes himself a protagonist of the documentary, and much of the film consists of his conversations with Holmes and Evans. Once Holmes is in prison and can no longer be recorded, Fielder recruits Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout, to play her in reenactments, and the film begins to follow the seemingly authentic conversations between Fielder and Seyfried as they comment on their dealings with Holmes’ family and try to weigh the truth.
The news media has called Holmes a pathological liar. This film, meanwhile, invites us to spend a few hours with her up close, watching her hold her husband, cry, swim in the ocean, and nurse her infant. She is tenderly humanized. Yet as Fielder doggedly pursues the truth about what actually happened, Holmes moves from staunchly defending her character to growing vague, stalling, claiming ignorance, and seizing on any interruption.
Photo by Tali Mackay, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
“All I know is my truth, and my love for my family,” she says, tearing up as if on cue. She and her husband present themselves as wildly, almost telepathically obsessed with each other. Each claims to hear the other’s voice in their head and to talk with the other when apart, knowing exactly what the other would say. Fielder is shocked that such total love and commitment could apparently exist in a couple who seem so untrustworthy.
Our culture is consistently reluctant to name and confront female wrongdoing; look no further than the Lindsay Clancy controversy. The power of this film is its willingness to hold female duplicity up to the light and demand the truth. It is disquieting to think that so destructive a liar could also be such an apparently wholesome mother. Holmes seems completely convinced that everything she says is true and that she has never committed a crime.
The film does acknowledge ways the media coverage and dramatizations may have misrepresented Holmes. When Seyfried learns that Holmes is being bullied in prison by inmates who know her only from Seyfried’s performance, she gets defensive on behalf of her own acting and of television as a whole. “It’s not our job to teach people,” she says. Fielder seems to disagree. He wants television and film to reveal the absolute truth, and while he knows that may be impossible, he wants to get as close as he can.
Holmes, a husky-voiced blonde with huge, unblinking blue eyes, comes across as so sweet and naive, almost stupid, that you find yourself tempted to believe her. You start to wonder whether she is simply an innocent person victimized by forces beyond her control. Or perhaps she is a schemer shielding herself. Evans invites two readings as well. He may be a controlling, narcissistic hustler. Or he may be a patriotic entrepreneur who loves his wife deeply and wants to protect her from an invasive media complex that has itself been shown to be full of lies.
Holmes never shows aggression or hostility. She nods, smiles, tears up, and is very quick to say “I don’t know” when asked a pointed question. Her husband and her father both firmly defend her honor, insisting that she has been traumatized and has done no wrong. “In decades, the whole story will come out,” her father assures us.
For all the ambiguity, her family on the whole comes across as falsely convinced of its own righteousness. As best we can tell, her persona of extreme innocence is a shield she has built to protect herself from culpability, and the family is committed to keeping it up. Holmes filed a request for commutation in 2025, which is still pending. For whatever reason, psychological or social, they cannot allow themselves to apologize and repent, even after her conviction.
The family shows how well-to-do people lie even to themselves: committed to a certain public image, they buy peace of mind at the cost of their souls. Faced with this, we have to ask ourselves: are we letting our own families buy into lies for the sake of convenience or pride?
In the social media age, everyone builds a persona. We all take part in producing news, photography, cinema, and tribal metanarratives, and we all present a constructed image of ourselves to others. What are we leaving out? What are we misusing? The film reveals that Holmes’ online presence is run by her husband, who posts inflammatory comments in her name and puts out AI models of her for public use, trading on her infamy for more clout.
Social media pushes us toward extreme behavior behind our online personas, and it arguably trains us to be overly compliant back in the “real world.” Perhaps out of fear of being caught on camera, we never want to be recorded being mean, and we are less willing than ever to confront people in public. We become flatterers, too eager to overlook wrongdoing and unwilling to call out sin. This film cuts against that generational habit. There is a time to set aside niceness in the search for truth.
Fielder carries over several narrative techniques he has honed throughout his oeuvre. He dwells on the ambiguity of reenacting conversations that were imperfectly remembered, and he shows us how he edits the script. He also returns to a familiar motif, the suggestion that he is falling in love with the woman he is documenting even as he criticizes her behavior. The film borders on metafiction as a result. Fielder invites us to suspect that he may be withholding information to present a certain narrative, even as he comes across as wholly authentic and takes pains to show the artifice of the documentary project. So much is exposed, from boom mics dropping into frame to Evans’ genitalia in the shower... but is that everything?
All of this might suggest that Fielder is more brutally honest than other documentarians and journalists, to say nothing of reality television producers. Or he is the most masterful manipulator of them all.
We are left certain that the title of the movie is itself a lie. Even in an age of cameras everywhere, there are still so many things we can’t see.
Michael Thomas Jones works in alternative education in northern Idaho.