Yes, We’re Adding Nathan Fielder’s Surprise Elizabeth Holmes Doc to the MFL
by Joe Reid · VULTURETwo days’ worth of speculation about a rumored “secret screening” at the Telluride Film Festival were put to rest on Sunday night as A24 unveiled the long-rumored Nathan Fielder–Lance Oppenheim quasi-documentary, You Can See Everything. The trailer for the film, the production of which had been under wraps for the past few years, debuted online just as the Telluride audience was sitting down to watch. In it, we see Fielder interviewing — in his own inimitable way — the notorious medical-tech grifter Elizabeth Holmes. While boiling down a Fielder documentary project to its simplest premise risks missing the point entirely, the gist is that Fielder interviewed Holmes in the weeks leading up to the start of her prison sentence in May 2023.
The Telluride Film Festival always operates, to some degree, under a cloak of secrecy. The lineup is never publicly announced, so if you want to know ahead of time which movies will play there, you have to perform logic puzzles with the other festivals’ lineups (“The Debut is listed at TIFF as a ‘Canadian premiere,’ so you know what that means …”) or else you just have to wait until the program leaks a few days before the festival begins. This is a feature, not a bug. Telluride has created a mystique around its inaccessibility — a festival at a Rocky Mountain resort for the moneyed elite offers an audience demographic a lot closer to the folks who will be voting for Oscars than the hoi polloi in Toronto or even New York. If a movie goes over with the well-to-dos in Telluride, it’s likely to be a fave among the Academy set as well. That’s good intel for studios as they decide which films and performances will get the full-court press of awards campaigning.
That inaccessibility also makes reports coming out of the various screenings feel like dispatches from behind the palace walls. “Such and such was a big hit in the room,” “Everybody’s talking about XYZ,” etc.
Then, over the course of the weekend, the whispers began to get louder about a secret screening. Festival secret screenings are like a behavioral experiment to see how quickly a vague hypothesis can circulate through the grapevine and return to you as solid fact. Would a movie like Digger or The Social Reckoning — two movies currently skipping festival season — make landfall earlier than expected? Or the new Laika movie, Wildwood? “Dune: Part Three!” the true believers yelled.
Speculation from people who talked to somebody who talked to somebody briefly revolved around the upcoming Ruben Östlund movie, The Entertainment System Is Down, which isn’t due until 2027 and which most people assume will make its debut at Cannes in May. Whispers were solidifying that it was an A24 movie, or a documentary, or something that was three hours long. It turns out the answer was all three.
Attendees at the You Can See Everything screening were reportedly forced to surrender their phones upon entering, and during a Q&A after the film were asked not to reveal the identity of the A-list actress who appears in it. (Not all outlets complied, so, now that the cat’s out of the bag: It’s apparently Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout.)
In tandem with the surprise festival screening, A24 also announced that You Can See Everything will be released in theaters on October 16. Obviously, we’ve now added it to the Vulture Movies Fantasy League, where you can select it for your roster when you draft. Now … should you select it? Fielder, Holmes, Theranos, Telluride … these are all to some degree niche interests. Will the audacity of suddenly springing this project on the moviegoing public lead to some box-office action? Which awards entities are likely to go for a movie like this? Given how intensively Fielder’s TV work has played with notions of reality and performance, I can’t imagine the Academy would let it qualify as a documentary.
And yet, in a world where true uniqueness is at a premium, maybe it’s worth taking a flyer on the movie that had the whole festival-industrial complex in a lather for over 48 hours.
Other Telluride Happenings
Fielder was the unlikely star of Telluride 2026, but plenty of other upcoming fall releases and Oscar hopefuls emerged with some degree of buzz. Through a combination of perusing the on-site reports/reviews and engaging in the usual back-channel gossip, here’s what I’ve gathered:
➼ The best-received movies at the festival were, in some order or another, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, and the Cannes hit La Bola Negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. All have definite Oscar ambitions. Kyle Buchanan, formerly of the New York Times and Vulture and currently launching his own eponymous podcast, is saying Club Kid is “in” as a Best Picture contender. And Variety’s Clayton Davis floated the test balloon for a Supporting Actress campaign for Club Kid’s Colleen Camp.
➼ Acting-award nomination slots were filling up fast at Telluride. The Best Actor race was a hot topic of conversation with Wild Horse Nine’s John Malkovich getting enthusiastic buzz for a long-awaited Oscar (he has been nominated twice, though not since 1993’s In the Line of Fire). But then came the raves for Andrew Scott in the Focus Features drama Elsinore. Scott plays actor Ian Charleson, who starred in the 1981 Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire and in a legendary National Theatre production of Hamlet, the latter of which he performed as he was dying of AIDS. Scott received enthusiastic raves and seems certain to at the very least pick up his first Oscar nomination.
➼ Meanwhile, if you ask the folks in Telluride, the Best Actress Oscar statue is currently being engraved for Julianne Moore in director Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut. Playing a New Jersey housewife who self-actualizes via community theater, Moore got loud praise (“astonishing,” said Variety). Combined with what basically everybody is declaring to be a “weak” year in Best Actress, Moore’s second Oscar (after winning for 2014’s Still Alice) has been deemed very likely.
➼ Another Best Actress contender if the Telluride reviews are to be believed is Carrie Coon, who stars in director Guy Nattiv’s The Liberation, playing a woman drawn into a cult in the 1980s. The Hollywood Reporter called the movie “devastatingly empathetic,” Variety deemed Coon herself “breathtaking,” and IndieWire’s Anne Thompson declared Coon had been launched into the Oscars race. It’s worth noting The Liberation comes from Bleecker Street films, whose movies (Rebuilding, A Love Story) tend to do better with indie awards; the company recently fell short on its Best Actress Oscar campaign for Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths.
➼ Less well received — or at least falling well short of the praise threshold of the abovenamed films — were the likes of Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, which one festival attendee told me “no one liked, unfortunately,” and Alpha Gang, the alien-invasion movie from directors David and Nathan Zellner (Sasquatch Sunset) that features Cate Blanchett in an eye patch. The reactions I heard about it were mostly nonplussed, though THR called it “all flash, no substance.” Still … Cate Blanchett in an eye patch! I remain intrigued.
We’re a little less than a month out from the start of scoring for this season of the Movies Fantasy League. If this Telluride dispatch helped you lock in your choices, you can submit your roster now.