‘You Can See Everything’ Review: Shocking Elizabeth Holmes Documentary With Nathan Fielder Is Like No Other You Have Ever Seen – Telluride Film Festival

If you think you know everything there is to know about Elizabeth Holmes, think again. A24 and filmmakers Nathan Fielder (creator and star of The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim (who also directed Venice premiere Primetime and the brilliant 2020 docu Some Kind of Heaven) are about the blow the lid off the story that has already been adapted into several documentaries, podcasts, bestselling books and a limited series that won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy for playing the controversial founder of healthcare technology start-up Theranos at age 19. Wealth and success followed until it all came crumbling down, resulting in guilty verdicts on four counts of defrauding investors; Holmes she was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years in prison for her crimes, giving birth to her second child just before entering prison.

The shocker here is that just 36 days before reporting to prison in Bryan, TX, Holmes, who hadn’t given an interview in a decade, decided to not only be interviewed, but she let Fielder and his crew into the San Diego home of her and boyfriend (and father of her two kids) Billy Evans with the understanding that “you can see everything” — and boy did they get to see everything. The unusual (to say the least) documentary, appropriately titled You Can See Everything, which runs nearly 3 hours, is unlike any I have ever seen in terms of pure access. These people appear to hide nothing.

It was shot beginning in 2023 in top secrecy — no one knew about it — and picks up two years later with some astonishing twists and turns and jaw-dropping surprises we can’t reveal. The secrecy continued all the way to Sunday night’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, where the movie was unveiled as a top-secret screening that included the lock-bagging of attendees’ cell phones and electronic devices before being allowed into the packed theater. It didn’t disappoint for any of the 174 minutes of its running time, an unusual and very unique documentary in which Fielder, a Canadian comedian known for traveling between reality and fiction, takes a starring role as a dogged, if deadpan, interviewer who uncovers one zinger after another. I kept thinking Sacha Baron Cohen would love this film.

It turns out it was pitched originally to A24, which told them if it didn’t work out and they wanted to ditch the project then just toss it in the garbage can. That kind of freedom was nice, but not necessary as you could easily tell from the premiere crowd’s reaction.

Holmes’ game-changing idea was a diagnostics company that “would utilize microfluidics to run hundreds of the most common blood tests using only a few drops of blood.” The real blood, it turned out, would be sucked from the accounts of investors big and small including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch among others. Fielder, who puts the camera frequently on his own incredulous and hilarious facial expressions, doesn’t hold back on challenging questions, grilling Holmes and the narcissistic Billy who even lets the cameras watch him take a shower with nothing left to the imagination. Much more than that is revealed here as Holmes maintains her innocence, denying she ever lied, or that her Theranos experiment was ever anything but completely legitimate. Of course she believes that, but will we? The doors are wide open and nothing seems to be off limits.

Fielder has a field day indeed grilling Holmes and Billy who are willing if wildly offbeat subjects here. In one strange scene he asks if they have ever heard of Abbott & Costello (no) or their comedy classic routine “Who’s On First,” which he proceeds to show them to elicit her bizarre interpretation. We meet Holmes’ parents including dad, who admits he once worked for Enron (of course). Fielder is fearless, including getting them to go to the storage bins to retrieve all the Theranos machinery in order to show that it really did work.

Nothing seems to be off limits as they agree to be miced-up for at least 12 hours a day, wide-angle cameras in place to get all movements, with other cameras getting closeups. Fielder immerses himself in this weird world as someone she comes to trust, much to his astonishment, becoming so close she asks him along on that last drive to prison. And it won’t be his final visit there either as the film’s second half starts with her incarceration; it doesn’t end there as crowd-pleasing twists are just getting started in this thing when we jump two years later.

It was at this point I thought, “OK, she is in prison, no place left to go with this.” Wrong. This is where it really gets good as the mystery of Elizabeth Holmes and the not-to-be-trusted Billy goes to new levels, and Fielder and Oppenheim manage to find an astonishingly clever second act that we won’t spoil here. You also will not be disappointed to see just how this filmmaking team and Fielder really dig up the secrets and lies(?) involving a woman no one was expecting to meet again for a very long time. It even starts to resemble a Bogart film as noirish music accompanies Fielder’s trip into the rabbit hole of Holmes and we go along for the ride wondering if maybe she is the sane one and Billy is the batsh*t crazy one.

There is one head-scratching scene after another as we ask why the hell would this pair give this kind of intimate invitation into their lives at this exact moment to nothing less than a stranger. Fielder even accompanies them to those aforementioned storage bins where they bring out the Theranos mechanisms and then lay them out at home to demonstrate how “real” the tech is. In another scene he fires up the Hulu limited series Dropout, in which Seyfried plays Holmes. He elicits her reaction and asks if any of it ever happened. The response is priceless.

A key question throughout is if Holmes is really the inveterate liar people came to believe she is. Whether the pair are doing this to make some quick money is a key point — did they covertly make a deal with A24 in that regard? A New York Times story is questioned for its claim; Holmes said, in reaction to the portrayals of her, “they’re not playing me, they’re playing a character I created.” If true, what does that say about her honesty? We never get the answer, but have plenty of questions after three bruising hours of this startling film guaranteed to blow your mind.

Fielder himself seems baffled by it all, stunned that an innocuous idea turned into a three-year trip into the mind of Elizabeth Holmes, no holds barred or expected. “What I am really excited about is for you to see the movie and tell me what I experienced,” he said during a Q&A following the first public screening at Telluride. “I don’t know why they wanted me there. Why am I there?”

We may never know that answer, but this is one hell of a ride trying to find out.

Producers are Tatiana Bears and Maggie Ambrose. Shout-out to David Bolen’s brilliant camera work.

Title: You Can See Everything
Festival: Telluride
Distributor: A24
Release date: October 2026
Directors: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim
Cast: Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, Christopher Abbott
Running time: 2 hrs 54 mins