A24 has pulled off one of the year’s best-kept movie secrets. Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim quietly spent three years making You Can See Everything, an unconventional documentary centered on disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. The film made its surprise world premiere Sunday night at the Telluride Film Festival and is set for a theatrical release in October.
The reveal immediately sent the film world buzzing, in part because virtually no one outside the production knew the project existed. Telluride took unusual steps to protect the surprise: audience members attending the festival’s mystery Sunday-night screening were required to secure their phones and other recording devices before entering the Werner Herzog Theatre. Security reportedly monitored the audience for anyone attempting to record the screening.
Then Fielder and Oppenheim walked onto the stage.
What followed was a 174-minute documentary about Holmes that early viewers have described as startling, unsettling and difficult to categorize. The film begins 34 days before Holmes was due to report to federal prison in May 2023, with Fielder, Oppenheim and a small crew given extraordinary access to her life with her partner, Billy Evans, and their young children.
Holmes had been convicted in 2022 on four fraud-related counts tied to Theranos, the blood-testing company that once made her one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated founders before its claims collapsed under scrutiny. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison and began serving her sentence in 2023.
But anyone familiar with Fielder’s work on Nathan for You and The Rehearsal probably knows this was never going to become a conventional talking-head documentary.
According to accounts from Telluride, what begins as an intimate observational portrait gradually becomes something far stranger. Fielder himself is pulled into the narrative as he tries to determine whether Holmes and Evans are being candid with him, performing for the camera, or attempting to influence the story being told.
A24’s first teaser captures that tension in a single exchange. In an extreme close-up, Holmes tells Fielder she has no reason to deceive him. When he asks whether she is being genuine, she replies, “I’m always being real.” The moment has quickly become the defining clip from the film’s rollout. Watch below:
Fielder appears to have emerged from the production with more questions than answers. During a post-screening conversation at Telluride, he said he is still trying to understand what he experienced while making the film. He described the production team repeatedly struggling to reach a consensus about what certain encounters with Holmes and Evans actually meant.
That ambiguity appears to be the movie’s engine. The filmmakers reportedly use elaborate recreations and other techniques that blur the line between documentary observation, performance and interpretation. Early critics have been careful not to reveal several of the film’s major turns, and that restraint is probably wise: much of the excitement surrounding You Can See Everything comes from not knowing where it is headed.
The project itself reportedly began in an appropriately odd fashion. Oppenheim has said he and Fielder were at Los Angeles’ Magic Castle when a magician asked the crowd to suggest the name of a celebrity. Someone shouted “Elizabeth Holmes.” Oppenheim then told Fielder he had heard that Holmes and Evans were interested in having their lives documented.
At first, Fielder questioned whether there was anything left to say. Holmes’ rise and collapse had already inspired John Carreyrou’s bestselling Bad Blood, Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and Hulu’s Emmy-winning The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried.
The access changed the equation.
Once Holmes entered prison, Evans became an increasingly important figure in the production. Fielder has said the filmmakers’ relationship with him eventually became strained as the project moved toward completion. At the time of the Telluride premiere, Holmes and Evans had not seen the finished film.
Early reaction has been unusually strong. Critics and attendees coming out of Telluride have called the film gripping, jaw-dropping and unlike conventional nonfiction filmmaking, while awards observers have already begun discussing its potential in the documentary race.
That makes You Can See Everything more than another entry in the already crowded Elizabeth Holmes media canon. With Fielder and Oppenheim behind the camera, the more interesting subject may ultimately be the camera itself and whether seeing everything gets us any closer to knowing what is true.
A24 will release You Can See Everything theatrically in October. As of publication, the studio has not announced a specific release date.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
