You Can See Everything’s Surprise Guest Cracks the Movie Open

Spoilers ahead for You Can See Everything, in theaters now.

Among the many cinematic influences swirling around in Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, one emerges about halfway through the movie when a new blonde woman enters the narrative. Oh my God, they’re doing Vertigo, I thought to myself while watching. In the 1958 Hitchcock film, the apparent death of one woman played by Kim Novak leads Jimmy Stewart to find a new woman and mold her into the one he lost. Holmes, the former founder of Theranos who was found guilty on four counts of fraud in 2022 and who insists on her innocence throughout the documentary, begins her 11-year sentence in a federal prison in Texas. Since Oppenheim and Fielder can’t record her there, their contact is mediated through her seemingly unstable and controlling husband, Billy Evans. In an attempt to uncover what might be going on in her mind, Fielder travels to a farm in upstate New York to meet actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes to much acclaim in the 2022 Hulu series The Dropout. Can someone who understands how to perform an idea of Holmes help Fielder and Oppenheim understand her as a person?

Seyfried turns out to be an essential aspect of You Can See Everything’s success as a film. She provides an invaluable counterbalance to Fielder and Oppenheim’s approach as both a commentator on Holmes’s persona and someone who, as a different kind of artist than Fielder and Oppenheim, has an orthogonal approach to thinking about the truth. Prior to her arrival, the film is confined largely to the claustrophobic rented California beach bungalow where Fielder and the documentary team spend time with Holmes, her husband, and their children. When Fielder plays some of that footage back for Seyfried on-camera — including a lasagna of a sequence where Seyfried watches Holmes watch The Dropout — she, a much more freely emotive person than Fielder, reacts out loud by saying many of the things that the audience might have been thinking earlier. It is weird how Holmes and Evans behave, Evans does come off as sinister, and it is funny how Holmes doesn’t seem to know how to beat eggs.

But Seyfried also contributes her expertise as an actor. At the end of the scene where she reviews that footage with Fielder, she starts to imitate Holmes’s lower voice and bearing, repeating some of her performance in The Dropout. Soon, in a sequence that recalls Fielder’s experiments with reenactments on The Rehearsal, he returns to that bungalow with Seyfried to re-create scenes from his time with Holmes — and in a scene that definitely recalls Vertigo, you see Seyfried getting her hair and makeup done to become Holmes. The idea is that, as an actor, she might be able to work backward to her subject’s psychology — you may also note the added tension of Holmes contesting a quote attributed to her in an article in which she says she was playing a character herself during her time at Theranos. Seyfried, now literally playing a character in playing Holmes, also fills in for moments that Oppenheim didn’t or couldn’t record. In a later sequence, with the help of Christopher Abbott, who plays Evans less aptly than Seyfried can nail Holmes, she re-creates the tense negotiation between Fielder, Oppenheim, Evans, Holmes, and executives from the movie’s studio A24. There, Seyfried plays out Fielder’s memory of Holmes leaving the room before Evans demands to be paid to participate in the documentary. (The producers agree to it, but the film later reveals that Evans ceded his stake after Fielder encouraged him to do so.) The reenactment probes a knotty question at the heart of the doc: Is Holmes as innocent as she says she is? And whether her claims of trustworthiness are a posture or not, does she knowingly let men like Evans do dirty work for her? It’s not something the film can definitely answer, but Seyfried’s performance allows the doc to sketch out some plausible answers. It’s a deft, haunting, complicated bit of work, which gets more detailed as she and Fielder discuss what they’ve learned about Holmes from his time with her. As on television, Seyfried nails Holmes’s wide eyes, unsteady mannerisms, deep voice, and mysterious vocal cadence that makes the character both unreal and oddly human. A friend of mine watching the film next to me wondered aloud if she might win an Oscar for it. (Would A24 have to campaign her only for the acting portion of the documentary? Is it possible to make a case for that?)

That would be fun, but the particular muddiness of You Can See Everything makes Seyfried as much a subject as a participant. She doesn’t just agree to play scenes as Holmes; she also joins Fielder on a trip to Texas to meet with Evans and probe him for answers about his relationship with his incarcerated partner. In that scene, Fielder, Evans, and Seyfried share dinner and drinks at Evans’s house, and Evans ambushes them — and, seemingly, Holmes herself — by putting a call from the prison on speaker so that Holmes is suddenly speaking to the woman who played her in a television series that she insists deeply upset her. The cameras capture Seyfried sinking into a couch with embarrassment as she tries to come up with something to say to Holmes. (She compliments her family.) Unlike Fielder, who has faced Holmes directly, Seyfried has only gotten to know her in the abstract.

The rest of that encounter is charged with the discomfort of Evans’s open distrust of Seyfried and Seyfried’s own defensiveness of her work. At one point, Seyfried starts to sound a bit like Holmes in the way she equivocates around the fact that she didn’t exactly play Elizabeth Holmes on The Dropout, but played a character suggested by the podcast reporting and other available materials that the series relied on. (We never do hear from other members of the creative team on that show about how they might feel about Holmes’s response to it, or Seyfried’s decision to get in touch with Evans, another thorn among the complications of the movie.) Evans, at that dinner, sees Seyfried and Fielder as two kinds of vultures, though to him, she may be the more dangerous one. He can negotiate with Fielder about his work in process; she has already released something he can’t control at all. The fact that Seyfried is a woman seems to bring out a side of Evans he hasn’t shown to Fielder and Oppenheim. Toward Seyfried, he turns petty and spiteful, implying that she’s a coastal elite actor who preyed on his wife’s misfortune and saying that she has no sense of the actual spirit of the country because she publicly criticized Charlie Kirk after his death — though thanks to shifting politics and the fact that Kirk’s death has become memed into absurdity a year later, that line now plays to Seyfried’s favor. That’s also another beat in the documentary where Evans and Holmes seem to misread or misunderstand popular culture, humor, or art. Evans, bafflingly, had thought of Fielder as the man he wanted to do a documentary about him and his wife after watching Nathan for You, a show about business scams. Holmes, in a wild early sequence, doesn’t seem to understand the basic premise of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” bit. It’s like seeing people who skipped all their liberal arts classes in school. They make pie-in-the-sky claims about their skill in science and technology but get antsy, vague, and pedantic about what their own words might mean or how they might come across as characters themselves. That’s probably what sets them off about Seyfried too; artists are dangerous people to be around, especially if you don’t know — or don’t want — to interpret yourself.

Seyfried’s involvement in the doc summits in its beguiling final sequence, which positions Fielder and Seyfried as two sides of a conversation about what kind of person Holmes is. Desperate for actual contact with Holmes, Fielder has arranged to meet her briefly at the prison before Evans shows up. Fielder can’t record that conversation, so he writes it down afterward to the best of his ability, returns to Seyfried’s farm to discuss it, then has her reenact it with him. That scene falls at the breaking point between documentary and narrative fiction and reminded me of what actress Merritt Wever, who appeared in Oppenheim’s fictional movie Primetime, told me about how she and Oppenheim debated their differing approaches to truth. As a documentarian, Oppenheim felt that truth is what can be captured through preparation and sometimes by accident on relatively objective devices — cameras, microphones. Wever, or an actor like Seyfried, argue through their work that you can arrive at another valuable, if subjective, emotional truth by channeling some sense of interiority as an artist.

When Fielder and Seyfried sit together in chairs by a fire at her farm and go over his last conversation with Holmes, what they’re doing is essentially a scene study. They scrutinize certain lines, talk about motivation, and wonder about how the scene might play with slight modifications. It’s also, compellingly, the moment they seem to trade sympathies. Seyfried came across as more sympathetic to Holmes earlier in the film, but now appears ruffled by her encounter with Evans and frustrated by Holmes’s dislike of The Dropout (as well as the fact that she mispronounces her last name), and she clocks that Fielder has, in spending so much time with Holmes, grown softer toward his subject. Seyfried notices that Fielder’s recollection is inexact, that he has allowed wiggle room for Holmes to maintain deniability about her knowledge of Evans’s actions through his written scene. The breakdown of communication between Oppenheim and Fielder and Holmes and Evans might make it impossible to get to the truth of Holmes. But the way in which You Can See Everything gives space to Seyfried’s perspective made me oddly, warmly hopeful. The documentary contains, through her participation and performance, the accommodation that facts alone are insufficient and maybe impossible. We also have to understand ourselves through art.