Audiences have a complex relationship with documentaries. It’s a powerful medium, in large part because it allegedly shows us the truth. “This,” most documentaries say, “is what really happened.” But it’s not. Not entirely. It’s what the filmmakers are showing us. It’s what they’re telling us. It’s what they’ve edited together to convey a narrative they’ve chosen, while making a point they’ve decided to make. That’s not to say that documentaries can’t be trusted, but they have to earn our trust if they want us to believe them. We shouldn’t take documentaries at face value, no matter how grainy and candid their footage is.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything” is a documentary that never earns our trust, and that’s great, because it’s a film about uncertainty. How do you document a person’s life when it’s impossible to believe them, about anything, which makes “the truth” an elusive prospect.
Ostensibly, Fielder and Oppenheim are trying to uncover the mysteries of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently serving an over 11-year federal prison sentence for fraud. They quickly come to the conclusion that they can come to no conclusions, and get pulled so fully into her world that they lose their objectivity, and wind up scrambling to transform what they didn’t see — and couldn’t even film — into an avant-garde art piece.
It’s a documentary about documentarians, since we learn far more about the medium’s complexities and flaws than we ever do about Holmes. We do glean a few things. Seemingly. We witness her bizarre family life, hear her myriad excuses for misleading her investors, and see what it’s like to watch the Emmy Award-winning Hulu mini-series “The Dropout” — a biopic about Holmes herself — with the real woman Amanda Seyfried was playing. As you can imagine, she feels really weird about it. We also watch Holmes’ husband, Billy Evans, passive-aggressively snatch a bowl of eggs from her hands because she was whisking them wrong. We even see him naked in the shower, presumably just to prove the title is accurate.
All these bizarre little moments, all these allegedly frank conversations, seem intimate. We want to believe them but Nathan Fielder — who starred in the ambitious reality-manipulating prank shows “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal” — is on screen the whole time. Anyone who doesn’t know Fielder’s schtick will probably find it odd, even egotistical, that he centers himself in a documentary about someone he doesn’t even know. Of course, anyone who does know him will probably think he’s up to something, since he’s a master manipulator himself.
“You Can See Everything” never quiets the little voice in your head that says Fielder can’t be trusted. The film frames him as the most qualified person, possibly in the world, to recognize a con when he sees one. Like Harry Houdini, the legendary stage magician who dedicated his spare time to debunking fake spirit mediums who catered to unsuspecting rubes, cinematic sleight-of-hand artist Fielder is here to expose a flimflam woman who’s deceiving people for real. If even the great Nathan Fielder can’t tell if Elizabeth Holmes is lying her head off, or being manipulated herself, or incapable of understanding the fundamental concept of truth, his failure isn’t just fascinating. For Fielder, it’s a full-blown existential crisis.
“You Can See Everything” is nearly three hours long. You would never know it. Fielder and Oppenheim make the time fly by, transforming minutiae into important clues, and withholding vital information until the last possible moment before it becomes cinematic malpractice. They mutate their obstacles into a self-aware cinematic underdog story. The “Lord of the Rings” movies weren’t as riveting as “You Can See Everything.” You might check your watch when “The Return of the King” is ending for the sixth time, but you’ll forget time exists when Fielder buys a bag of jerky from a prison vending machine.
And yet, even though “You Can See Everything” captures our attention, what have we received in return? We’ve learned a lot about Elizabeth Holmes without getting any of the answers we wanted. We’ve learned a lot about documentarians who can’t crack their own documentary, and how to resort to prestigious trickery to make footage materialize that doesn’t exist. By the time Nathan Fielder is [information redacted] with [information redacted] and questioning the very nature of honesty — arguing that perhaps only fiction can make reality feel real, and only reality can make fiction feel justified — we’ve entered into a paradoxical vortex from which a sane person may never escape, and in which Fielder apparently lives.
Co-director Lance Oppenheim recently released his fictional biopic “Primetime,” about Chris Hansen and his morally mucky hit series “To Catch a Predator.” In that film, Oppenheim tries to get into the head of the type of person who turns real life tragedy into entertainment, and ultimately declares the whole concept inexcusably vile. One wonders, since “You Can See Everything” was filmed years beforehand, whether making this film solidified Oppenheim’s thesis. Maybe Elizabeth Holmes is irredeemable. Maybe she’s not guilty. Maybe we’re irredeemable for entering her home. Maybe we’re understandably curious. Maybe making a movie about a person, and a situation, with this much baggage is an errand that reveals more about the fools who undertake the assignment than their supposed subjects.
“You Can See Everything” is impossibly involving, at first as a documentary, and later as an interrogation of the form. Fielder and Oppenheim highlight never-before-seen fine print in the contract between documentarians and their audience, and underline the double-speak so we’ll never read it the same way again. “You Can See Everything” transcends the documentary form while burning the whole enterprise down. It may be the finest autopsy of deception, and indictment of truth, since Orson Welles’ “F for Fake” pulled the rug out from under us 53 years ago. It’s easy to imagine Welles, a cinematic and stage magician Welles himself, applauding the film’s creative sincerity and earnest lies, and patting the directors on the back for pulling it off.
“You Can See Everything” is in select theaters starting Oct. 16, 2026.
