by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, Amanda Seyfried
Intro:
`… transgressive and open … seeking to understand what it sees without falling back on truisms and easy explanations.
You Can See Everything is a title so simple and so potent that it’s hard to believe that it hasn’t been used until now. Coupled with the wide blue eyes on the film’s poster, it promises the endless, uncensored content of the internet age, a world without gatekeepers or corporate media, a world where we can watch the derangement of the rich elite on every platform. And, as the film’s production company A24 knows, it’s great marketing.
Those eyes belong to Elizabeth Holmes, formerly a Steve Jobs-esque wunderkind of biotech and the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, now notorious as a fraudster who managed to dupe investors and journalists and Henry Kissinger until the truth came out: her miraculous technology—a device that could quickly, cheaply perform a multitude of blood tests on a small sample—was a hoax.
After the reporting and trials that led to her conviction, Holmes contacted A24 to arrange a documentary about her and her partner—the tech millionaire Billy Evans—for the month of April 2023, immediately before she began serving her prison sentence. The documentary filmmakers were Nathan Fielder—the Canadian comedian made famous by the television series Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, where he maintains an extreme deadpan straddling the line between Sacha Baron Cohen and Socratic idiot—and Lance Oppenheim, who has previously made other documentaries as well as this year’s awards-bait drama Primetime.
It’s not apparent that Holmes and Evans know who these two are, or if they have any understanding of documentaries more complex than the Netflix puff-production Harry and Meghan; but they are convinced that they are innocent victims of a corrupt world, and that an outside observer could show that to the public. In this spirit of transparency, they give the film crew full access to the property, with cameras installed to capture every part of the couple’s day—including, in a moment of winking gratuity, Evans showering post-workout.
Fielder’s persona is dialled down here as he tries to play the role of journalist rather than comedian. While he is informed about the case and believes that Holmes committed fraud, he still harbours a certain curiosity about her as a person. So, the film unfolds with Fielder observing the two and conversing with them, asking apparently simple questions in scenes that quickly turn surreal and unnerving.
Early in the runtime, Fielder plays a recording of Holmes telling a journalist that her patented device ‘can’ run hundreds of tests on a minute sample of blood. When asked to explain this, given that the technology never successfully demonstrated this capacity, Holmes claims that she meant that the device ‘could’ theoretically run these tests, assuming that the technology for said tests had been separately developed; when Fielder confronts her about this convenient reading, pointing out that the journalist speaking to her and everyone else took her to mean that the technology was already capable of running the tests, Holmes can do little more than smile and affirm her own version of events.
Here, Holmes embodies an invulnerable self-belief and disregard for reality—but that’s not enough to make her interesting in today’s world. After all, you can find the same thing in any number of interviews with billionaires, influencers, gurus, as well as the President of the United States. This particular language of self-belief and self-marketing is endemic to entrepreneurs, particularly in Silicon Valley, where Holmes cut her teeth. The only difference here between her and Elon Musk—who the filmmakers subtly nod to throughout the film—is that Teslas work.
But Fielder pushes on her personality, testing her in one scene by playing the Abbott and Costello skit ‘Who’s on First’. First, Holmes says that she has never seen it before—highly unlikely for any 39-year-old American elite, but not necessarily implausible. Then, after she laughs at the scene, Fielder asks her to explain the joke. As he repeatedly, unsuccessfully pushes her to explain the famous wordplay of ‘Who’s on First’, it dawns on him and the audience that she genuinely does not understand the simple joke, that she is not simply putting on a smiling persona that denies reality and her own wrongdoing, but her psyche has become so warped that she barely comprehends anything around her, her face stuck in a wide-eyed rictus. It makes the questions of truthfulness and lying that the film pursues seem absurd, even as the audience now wonders how someone so obviously unwell could exert such a pull on so many people—including both Evans and Fielder.
You Can See Everything has already become a box office and cultural phenomenon, in part because it’s the rare documentary that is genuinely cinematic: the lighting is artful, the editing carefully builds rhythms, while the sound adds to the film’s unease. It is a film as carefully crafted as any drama, even as it mostly eschews the showy indulgence of Oppenheim’s previous film, Primetime. Moreover, it is a film that is consciously aware of its place in cinema history, moving between the genres of reality television and thriller and rom-com, and recalling films as varied as Vertigo, Persona, The Zone of Interest, The Act of Killing, and This is Not a Film.
It is also a film that lives up to the form of documentary in a way that most others fail to. Leaving aside corporate streaming productions like Harry and Meghan—which have no interest in truth—so many independent productions simply give new footage to preconceived narratives, as in the work of Michael Moore and Alex Gibney. What You Can See Everything offers here is a work that is as transgressive and open as Fielder himself, seeking to understand what it sees without falling back on truisms and easy explanations.
Ultimately, You Can See Everything maintains its fascination even as the question of Holmes recedes and the film comes closer to the strangeness of our present moment: AI models and social media personas, the chasms that separate the lives of wealthy Americans from the rest of the nation, the patterns of martyrdom and polarisation that are now inevitable whenever a prominent figure falls from grace. By the end of the film, you’re left with the feeling that Elizabeth Holmes isn’t special, but this film is because—like the Epstein files, like the Pelicot trial—it’s all recorded, so that you can actually see what’s happening.
