This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the new documentary You Can See Everything premiered, chronicling the final weeks of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before she reported to federal prison, viewers were left wrestling with a cinematic experience that felt akin to waking up from an Inception-esque dream within a dream. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the nearly three-hour film is a winding, twisting labyrinth of context. It effortlessly merges Fielder’s Dadaist, boundaryless approach to documentary subjects with Holmes’s hypnotic affect—a demeanor that continuously oscillates between highly effective gaslighting and blinding, self-deluded earnestness. Decades after the collapse of her blood-testing startup, figuring out which is which remains an elusive puzzle.
What happens when you take two unreliable narrators—or three, if you include Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-camera persona morphs from a protective, naive tech bro into an unscrupulous grifter—put them in a jar, and shake them? The result is a disorienting freefall where the more questions are asked, the further the truth drifts out of reach. Watching the film feels much like staring at a Magic Eye image, slightly crossing your eyes while desperate to make out the hidden three-dimensional subject, only to never quite manage to see it. Eventually, viewers are left worrying their eyes might just get stuck that way.
The discourse surrounding the film is already abundant, but to truly understand the psychological undercurrents of the project, one must look at the small details. If you are familiar with the hallmarks of Fielderian programming, you know that the comedian-filmmaker is notoriously prone to hyperfixating on seemingly mundane details that later return to completely upend viewers’ expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such pivotal detail is observed in an understated exchange between Holmes and Evans as they make eggs together in their kitchen. How much can genuinely be gleaned from watching someone prepare breakfast? As it turns out, a staggering amount.
In the first half of the film, Fielder is fully embedded in the rental home of Holmes and Evans, who have invited the filmmakers to document the final countdown before Holmes surrenders to authorities. Exactly how and why they agreed to this arrangement remains incomprehensible if they possessed even a passing familiarity with Fielder’s previous provocative work. During this intimate window, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn toward Holmes. She seems genuinely intent on convincing the filmmakers—and Fielder specifically—that she is a sweet, misunderstood victim of circumstance rather than a Machiavellian con woman who defrauded millions from investors.
Frankly, aspects of this claim feel unsettlingly convincing at times. Viewers are invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded moments, including a scene in which she makes breakfast alongside Evans. As Fielder interviews her, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera lingers on her feeble whisking technique, capturing every hesitant movement. Then, after a few seconds, another set of hands abruptly enters the frame: those of Evans. Without uttering a word, he takes the bowl and fork directly from Holmes and begins whipping the eggs with considerably greater fervor.
Backseat driving in the kitchen is hardly uncommon among domestic partners, though it typically serves as a fast track to petty bickering. Evans tells Fielder at one point that he and Holmes never fight, while Holmes is equally emphatic that she has never lied in her life—statements that only further cement their status as unreliable narrators. What is far less common, or at least generally considered rude and aggressive, is grabbing something directly out of your partner’s hands mid-task to completely take over. Fielder points this out, asking Evans why he felt the need to forcefully take the eggs. Holmes quickly explains that Evans simply doesn’t like the way she mixes them and genuinely thinks he can do it better.
It is a tiny, fleeting interaction, but a remarkably revealing one. Evans feels entirely comfortable taking control of a task Holmes is performing without so much as asking for permission, seemingly oblivious to how his behavior might be perceived on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears thoroughly accustomed to the intrusion, offering a mild explanation rather than an objection. Granted, unlike sustained and unblinking eye contact, beating eggs does not appear to be one of Ms. Holmes’s strong suits. Typically, one does so vigorously to aerate the mixture and make the resulting scramble or omelet fluffier, a culinary fundamental she seems to bypass entirely.
Yet, because this is Elizabeth Holmes, the moment demands a deeper psychological interrogation. Could this be a classic case of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, wishing to avoid the mundane task of beating eggs altogether, she intentionally does so insufficiently simply to force Evans to take over? Is she being controlled, or is she brilliantly manipulating someone else into doing her work for her? Or is this merely further evidence of her distinct way of thinking—a cognitive blind spot where she genuinely does not know the correct way to beat an egg?
Throughout the interviews featured in the film, Holmes portrays the Theranos years as a period during which she was heavily manipulated by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She steadfastly maintains that her ultimate intentions were beneficial for humanity, regardless of the catastrophic consequences for investors and patients who received dangerously unreliable test results. Whether she genuinely believes this revisionist account of history or simply knows how to sell it with absolute conviction remains one of the film’s central mysteries. It runs parallel to the broader question of the extent to which her romantic relationships consistently lead her to take the fall for the actions of worse men.
These complex questions reverberate heavily in the second half of the documentary. Once Holmes is safely behind bars, viewers learn deeply unsettling things about Evans. It is revealed that he holds power of attorney over Holmes and has been utilizing her official X account to broadcast bizarre, profanity-laced remarks that feel entirely incongruent with her carefully cultivated public manner of speaking. Suddenly, the seemingly harmless egg-beating scene takes on a much darker hue, looking like an early, subtle indication that Evans is far more domineering than the protective-partner persona he meticulously presented to the cameras.
His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be genuine on some level, but it is nearly impossible to reconcile with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another bizarre entrepreneur’s Theranos obsession. Furthermore, it is difficult to look past his apparent acceptance of the possibility that her AI-generated likeness could be exploited to create pornography or other digital content entirely antithetical to her personal interests.
And yet, even as Evans emerges as an increasingly unsavory character, Holmes herself remains entirely inscrutable. Does she actually know what he is doing on the outside? Does she tacitly approve of his actions? Is he ruthlessly exploiting her vulnerable circumstances for his own gain, or are they working in tandem toward a shared objective—whether reputational, monetary, or otherwise? The film offers kaleidoscopic, contradictory evidence for competing interpretations, floating the unsettling possibility that even if Holmes is being dominated in the relationship, she may be entirely content with that dynamic.
What is truly extraordinary about Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary is its optical-illusion-like layers of constructed truth. Despite the film featuring harrowing close-ups of microexpressions and guarded glances, there is a vast chasm between what Holmes and Evans say aloud, what they actually do, what they have done in the past, and what they plan to do next—such as reportedly launching a Theranos 2.0 startup called Haemanthus. Complicating matters further is Fielder’s own well-documented history as a provocateur, a faux-earnest architect of awkwardness who will go to virtually any lengths to actualize a concept and who remains remarkably capable of keeping a stone-cold straight face through any scenario.
Viewers are left questioning Fielder’s sincerity just as much as his subjects’. There are several tense moments in the film where audiences are left wondering if there is palpable, unspoken sexual chemistry between him and Holmes, and whether Fielder might actually act on it. If he did, consensus among viewers breaks down entirely over whether such a move would be genuine human connection, an elaborate act of performance art, or whether Fielder even recognizes any barriers separating the two.
Ultimately, the film’s most revealing moments are those that feel entirely off-script for everyone involved: a fleeting microexpression, an odd word choice in an otherwise emphatic statement, or a series of tense gestures exchanged over a bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects willingly invited cameras into their lives to be watched, yet there are only a handful of fleeting moments when they seem to forget they are on display. Those rare instances provide the clearest, albeit still murky, insight into their actual reality. That pervasive murkiness appears to be both the central point and the overarching irony embedded in the film’s title.
You Can See Everything elevates Nathan Fielder’s reputation far beyond that of a mere master of cringe humor, revealing a genuine glimmer of auteur genius. The story feels almost fateful in its ability to showcase his unique gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities of how humans interact with one another under the harshest lights. Even when an overarching idea is grand and sweeping, it turns out that the smallest, most mundane details matter the most. And in a documentary that explicitly promises you can see everything, audiences learn that it is entirely up to us to look closely—and even then, what we see might look entirely different in another light.
