Nathan Fielder Has Made the Movie of the Year

There are a bunch of scenes from You Can See Everything that I’ve been turning over and over in my head like river stones since seeing it at the New York Film Festival on Wednesday night. But there’s one in particular I keep coming back to, from sometime in the first third of the documentary, which is just under three hours long and earns every mind-boggling minute. Nathan Fielder, who’s been given access to Elizabeth Holmes and her family over the five weeks leading up to the start of her prison sentence in May 2023, sits down with the Theranos founder and her husband, Billy Evans, to show them what he describes as quite possibly the most famous comedy routine of all time. The pair says they’re unfamiliar with Abbott and Costello, and as “Who’s on First?” plays on the television, Fielder watches Holmes watch the bit for what’s apparently the first time. She wears the same beatific smile that seems to be the standard expression for her face as she jiggles her younger child, then a baby. “Do you understand why that’s funny?” he asks afterward, when she claims to have enjoyed the video. “They were talking over and past each other,” she responds. But when he asks the disgraced tech mogul the name of the first baseman — the key to the premise of the extended joke — she can’t answer him. She insists she didn’t catch it.

It may not seem like there should be anything more to say about Holmes at this point, after her well-documented downfall spawned a whole mini-industry of content, from books to podcasts to Sundance movies to the scripted Hulu miniseries The Dropout. But there were times in You Can See Everything, when she turns her unblinking, too-wide gaze on Fielder, during which I was tempted to think she’s one of the greatest doc subjects of all time. She’s a profoundly uncanny and elusive object of focus, though what really makes the movie so astounding, a metanarrative mille-feuille about all the ways we try to gauge the truth, is how Holmes’s freak squares with Fielder’s, and how Primetime prodigy Lance Oppenheim, with whom Fielder shares a co-director credit, shapes the project into something shockingly cinematic. Holmes insists, with a dazed naïveté whose authenticity is impossible to judge, that not only does she not understand how she got into trouble, but that she’s never told a lie in her life. Fielder, meanwhile, brings his signature awkwardness and his well-established tendency to blur the lines between the performed and the genuine. It’s like they were made for one another.

You Can See Everything, which is getting a theatrical release from A24 on October 16, is essentially powered by dueling neurodivergencies. That becomes explicit whenever Evans, who engineered the documentary’s existence, comes to the forefront. A standard grindset tech bro who likes working out and watching microbiology videos on 2x speed, he loves to talk about how his wife “just thinks differently,” and how he wanted Fielder’s involvement because he seemed like someone who thought “outside the box.” What he means by that shifts alarmingly as the movie progresses, especially after Holmes heads off to start serving what was initially an 11-year sentence in a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas (though news broke last week that she has been approved for a transfer to a halfway house in 2027). The first hour of the film, which is also the funniest, takes place in the beachside Del Mar cottage complex where Holmes, Evans, and their two kids hole up for one last concentrated stretch of family time, with Fielder observing and posing questions throughout, lurking in the background like a sleep-paralysis demon. It’s a surreal, agonizingly intimate window during which to try to get interviews, but Fielder is determined, and Holmes swears that everything is on the table even as Evans tries to shape the proceedings.

Is the intrusiveness of the film team the point for Holmes, in that it allows her to leverage the limited time she has left with her loved ones as a shield and a tool? It’s impossible to tell, and it’s increasingly clear that she and her husband have staked out different, potentially conflicting agendas as their motivations for participating in the project. In the talks he has with Holmes in that first act, Fielder stares at her like someone trying to figure out if the player across the table in a poker game is bluffing. The empty off-season oceanfront and blown-out light add to the dreamlike atmosphere, the sense of unreality that runs throughout the film and morphs as it moves to Texas, where Evans becomes the focus as Holmes is behind bars, and then into an incredible third act that I don’t want to spoil aside from saying that it manages to be equal parts Errol Morris and Vertigo. You Can See Everything is a movie about the motivations and the ethics of documentary film, about what it means to label something nonfiction even when it’s edited and shaped and the camera can’t capture everything. It’s about performance, raising questions about whether the Holmes we see is just the latest persona of a woman who famously made herself into a doodle of a tech iconoclast to win over funders, then even more pointedly asking what it means for her public perception to be dictated by the media about her.

But it is also, more profoundly, about how we decide whether we really know what’s going on in the head and the heart of another person, where manipulation ends and investment begins. Fielder, listening to audio in his headset and curling up at night on a bare mattress in the spare room of that Del Mar rental, starts to look like a figure on a doomed but noble quest. Holmes tells him that she sees the film as a human story, as though by simply showing herself in her entirety, she could convince the world to finally be on her side. But in You Can See Everything, the closer we get to her, the less knowable she is — a set of pointillist dots in the shape of a person.

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