"You Can See Everything"

 ☆☆☆☆½

"The rich are different from you and me."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

This can't be mere coincidence, can it? Less than three weeks into October, and the month has delivered three entirely different, extraordinary films that deal, in their own ways, with one of the foundational questions of existence: How do we know what we know? Can we really trust our eyes and ears?

The latest, following Digger and La Bola Negra, is the documentary You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, in which the often satirical, even-more-often ironic filmmakers make the most of the remarkable (and remarkably weird) opportunity to be flies on the wall in the last days before Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced, convicted founder of Theranos, goes to prison for 12 years.

Theranos, you may recall, was the company that claimed it could run almost any diagnostic blood test off of one drop of blood. The story of the company and of odd, off-putting Holmes has been told before. You Can See Anything wastes precious little of is three-hour running time rehashing the story.

What it tries to understand is how Holmes let any of it happened, whether she was telling the truth at her trial, whether she really believed what she said, whether she deserved her prison sentence or is a victim herself — and, if so, of what or whom? Other people have done far worse and not gone to prison. It isn't hard to name them these days. But Holmes was different. Why?

It becomes clear right away in this mesmerizing, entirely unexpected documentary that Holmes is one of Fitzgerald's rich. She and her husband Billy Evans maintain over and over and over that Holmes never sold a single share, that money wasn't the goal for Holmes. It was for someone. But who? And how? And what if Holmes, with her unblinking doe eyes and her fixed smile, is lying? Or, even stranger, perhaps, what if she's telling the truth?

But the truth about what? The more Fielder, who is a constant on-camera presence, pushes Holmes, the more it seems she resists, even when she's acquiescing. This is an odd movie about an odd person. Holmes may not have been building Theranos for money, but she clearly has a lot of it. So do the people around her. It's just one of a thousand contradictions exposed, dissected, and turned inside-out in this film. These people are different, and this movie revels in this curiosity.

I could say "this documentary," but there are times when Fielder is aware that nothing in the film plays like a documentary. It's not even designed like a documentary. Can we believe those two shots? Can we trust every reaction shot? Should we take it as a matter of faith that cameras were everywhere, because they sure seem especially good at being in the right place at the right time.

The deeper Fielder gets into the story, and the closer Holmes comes to actually going to prison, the weirder, stranger and more complicated You Can See Everything gets. Fielder gets uncomfortably close to his subject. He seems to be everywhere, in a movie that is ostensibly a documentary and biography, and eventually we've got to ask if everything we're seeing is real. It seems to be, and yet it all seems ... convenient.

Then, when a traditional documentary would have been wrapping up, You Can See Everything does something that either solidifies its documentary classification or undermines it entirely. And everything about Holmes, her world, and her story becomes even stranger still. Evans turns into the movie's most loathsome figure (or is it character?), and almost every word out of his mouth seems to turn You Can See Everything back in on itself again.

It's all disorienting and captivating, unlike any documentary you've seen, and more akin to a psychological thriller in which the plot moves in byzantine ways.

By the end, it's hard to imagine that anyone who watches You Can See Everything will be neutral about Holmes. And there's every possibility that whatever opinion you came in with will have changed by the end of the movie. Not just your opinion about her, but about, well, almost everything.

Viewed October 18, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

1215