When was the last time you saw a full house for a documentary? For me, it was the 2007 opening of Michael Moore’s Sicko. Exposés like Moore’s fell out of fashion, however, and these days, it’s rare to see nonfiction in commercial multiplexes at all.
Until You Can See Everything, codirected by Lance Oppenheim (Primetime) and postmodern comedy phenomenon Nathan Fielder. At a matinee on a sunny Saturday, Vermonters jockeyed for seats for the nearly three-hour film, which is suddenly at the center of award-season conversation.
The deal
It’s 2023, and Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her tech startup. Claiming she’d invented a device that could run a raft of blood tests on a finger-prick sample, she partnered with Walgreens, became a celebrity and silenced her critics — until everyone learned the hard way that her invention didn’t work.
Holmes has refused most interviews since the scandal broke. With just 34 days of freedom left, however, she invites a documentary crew to share a beachside condo with her; her partner, Billy Evans; and their two young kids.
On his Comedy Central show “Nathan for You,” Fielder concocted creative — some would say absurd — business strategies. Holmes and Evans seem to see him as a potential ally. His off-the-cuff interview style makes it clear he’s neither scientist nor investigative journalist, just a regular guy trying to grasp how Holmes rose so fast and fell so far.
When Holmes insists her fraud was merely a misunderstanding, however, Fielder gives her the pained look most people reserve for door-to-door evangelists. Searching for shreds of self-awareness, he makes Holmes watch Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” sketch and Amanda Seyfried’s performance as her in the Hulu series “The Dropout.” Holmes is not amused.
Despite such contretemps, Fielder insinuates himself into the household as an acerbic friend of sorts. But after his subject goes to jail, things get weird.
Will you like it?
At the start of Season 2 of his HBO show “The Rehearsal” (see sidebar), Fielder has an existential crisis over whether a comedian can address real-world problems. “Maybe,” he concludes hopefully, “a clown can change the world after all.” Later in the season, he muses, “I’ve always thought that sincerity is overrated. It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.”
Those two quotes tell us a lot about Fielder’s relationship with Holmes in the documentary. She’s fully committed to her performance of sincerity — the unblinking stare, the tears. And he’s a clown trying to change the world, equipped with an ornery suspicion of anyone trying to play on his sympathies. Fielder may not be able to demolish Holmes’ bad science, but he knows how to get her and Evans comfortable enough to reveal the cracks in their perfect-family façade.
You Can See Everything is not a “gotcha” doc with a smoking-gun revelation. Its central question is not “Did Holmes commit fraud?” — the evidence is readily available — but “What kind of person commits this fully to a deception?” That’s a question the film nudges us to answer on our own, along with “Would I have been duped?”
Like Fielder’s TV series, You Can See Everything pushes the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, making us question what we’re really seeing. While the footage of Holmes has a fly-on-the-wall quality, Oppenheim’s extreme close-ups and high-contrast, cinematic lighting make us feel as if we’re watching an award-worthy thriller, as does the brooding soundtrack by Ari Balouzian. At my screening, the audience’s laughter at Fielder’s sardonic delivery gradually melted into uneasy quiet. The interpersonal tension is so high in every scene that the run time flies by.
The film’s second half features reenactments of pivotal off-camera moments and scripted-feeling scenes in which Fielder attempts to process what he’s seen. The effect is to throw us off-kilter again — how much of this is real? Are we approaching the truth about Holmes, or moving away from it?
In an unprecedented move for a documentary, distributor A24 has submitted You Can See Everything for Oscar consideration in the categories of Best Picture and Best Actress. (The latter’s identity is a spoiler, but suffice it to say she becomes the film’s most likable figure.) Given all this intertwining of fact and fiction, some viewers may ask whether You Can See Everything is bringing us truth or just true-crime entertainment. Are we, in fact, seeing everything, or nothing much at all?
Maybe we’re learning to see our world better — a world in which politicians and online influencers routinely use their raw charisma to bulldoze facts and brush aside inconvenient realities. Whether you find Holmes’ turn as a misunderstood victim convincing or not, people fall for similar performances every day. Sometimes it takes a clown to remind us to keep our eyes wide open.
If you like this, try…
“The Rehearsal” (two seasons, 2022-25, HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In this bizarrely earnest reality series, Fielder constructs elaborate “rehearsals” to prepare people for difficult social interactions.
“The Dropout” (2022; Disney+, Hulu): The fact-based dramatization of Holmes’ story is an indispensable companion to You Can See Everything.
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Alex Gibney’s more traditional documentary will get you up to speed on the facts of Holmes’ fraud. Or read Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, the journalist who broke the story, along with his thoughts on the film in the New York Times.
The original print version of this article was headlined “You Can See Everything”
This article appears in October 28 • 2026.
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