Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary is real, and it’s coming to theaters in October.
Rumors have been swirling for years that the acclaimed comedian and filmmaker behind “Nathan for You” and HBO’s “The Rehearsal” had been visiting the convicted fraudster in prison and filming a documentary. Sunday night, A24 revealed that it will release that documentary — titled “You Can See Everything” — in theaters in October.
The film has its world premiere Sunday night at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was just announced as the secret screening.
Here’s the official synopsis for the film from A24:
Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.
That’s a humdinger of a premise to keep secret for this long — Holmes entered prison in May 2023 and is serving out an over 11-year sentence stemming from her work at her health technology company Theranos. Holmes was accused of defrauding patients with faulty promises — namely that a single small blood sample could be used for a litany of tests with a proprietary machine.
Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients but was convicted of defrauding investors in her federal trial alongside former Theranos chief operating officer, and Holmes’ former boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
You can watch the unsettling first teaser trailer for “You Can See Everything” below, which finds Fielder uncomfortably pressing Holmes on whether she’s being “real” while she comforts her newborn child.
Hollywood has been chasing the Elizabeth Holmes story for years. At one point, Jennifer Lawrence was set to play her in a film to be directed by Adam McKay, but that project was scuttled when Liz Meriwether’s Hulu limited series “The Dropout,” starring Amanda Seyfried, was made first.
Alex Gibney made the 2019 documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” but of course Fielder and Oppenheim are documentary filmmakers of a different sort.
Fielder relishes the absurd, with his documentaries largely serving as comedies first and foremost. His Comedy Central docuseries “Nathan for You” ran from 2013 to 2017 and saw him pitching himself as a “fixer” for oddball businesses needing help, and his HBO series “The Rehearsal” finds Fielder using the additional resources afforded by an HBO budget to craft elaborate, wildly absurd joke set-ups using real-life people.
Oppenheim, meanwhile, made a name for himself in the documentary world with 2020’s “Some Kind of Heaven” and 2024’s “Spermworld,” as well as the 2024 HBO docuseries “Ren Faire,” all of which were more straightforward docs than Fielder’s work, but with a heavy cinematic flair.
Recently, Oppenheim made the leap to narrative features with the A24 film “Primetime,” which stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and just debuted at the Venice Film Festival to mostly rave reviews.
