You Can See Everything (2026): And Yet ...and Yet?

 By Len Weiler

By now, you’ve probably heard or read quite a lot about the new movie You Can See Everything.  It is an intriguing, surprising, riddle of a movie, curiously funny at times, and a puzzling brain teaser at others.  One of the better movies I’ve seen so far this year and certainly the most provocative. 

At the center of the picture are the convicted fraudster, Elizabeth Holmes (founder of the now defunct blood analytics company Theranos); and her interviewer, Nathan Fielder. Holmes, who prefers to be called Liz, and her fiancé Billy Evans invited Fielder and company into their home, granting them virtually unlimited access. While their  underlying rationale is somewhat murky, Liz and Evans promised to be open to any questions and as forthright and as can be. Which is where the movie’s title comes from. 

The interviews begin just 34 days before Liz is to begin her sentence and continue right up to the moment she enters the prison gates on May 30, 2023. Fielder and his crew  put in about 16 hours a day with Liz and family – in fact, for the last couple of weeks Fielder literally lived with them, staying in the guest room. All told, the production accumulated an extraordinary 700 hours of footage. This includes, I believe, the remarkable coda which takes up the entire last act of the picture, and which I shall not discuss to avoid spolers. But the bulk of tall that filming was with Holmes and family. Somehow, it all got whittled down to a film that is “only” 174 minutes long.

You Can See Everything is a “meta-documentary”,  in which everyone -  the participants as well as the audience - are aware that everything is being recorded on camera. The cameras are in plain view, and Fielder is conspicuously wearing sound recording equipment.  

The central question hanging over the enterprise is not merely who is Liz Holmes but, notwithstanding her ongoing proclamations of innocence and her stubborn defense of the Theranos technology, is she in fact telling the truth – or more precisely, does she really believe that she’s telling the truth?  Going into the movie, most people assume, as did I, that she’s guilty as hell based on all that we’ve heard or read about the story in the press.  Fielder confesses to Liz right at the outset that this is his mindset, too. But if she really does believethat demonstratively untrue things are true, should she be culpable?

Liz steadfastly insists not only that she did she not lie about her actions and intentions, but that her miniature blood testing device, “Edison”, actually worked. Evidence to the contrary may have had to do with sloppy manufacturing or operator training, and like factors. But she was not trying to defraud anyone. Her seeming sincerity never waivers. And damn, her apparent openness, her large unblinking blue eyes, and her innocent-seeming composure, question after question, hour after hour, day after day never waivers.  

Fielder is a comic actor who’s schtick is a socially awkward, deadpan demeanor. In the past, he has used this in contrived, somewhat cringy situations for intended humorous effect. For example, in his Comedy Central show, Nathan For You (2013 - 17), he posed as a business consultant giving off-the-wall advice to struggling small businesses.  In the HBO series The Rehearsal (2022 -  ), he pretends to be a sort of life coach helping clients rehearse for upcoming difficult situations – such as confessing a past lie to long-time friends – by taking them through elaborate rehearsals for all possible conversational  outcomes. I did not find either of those shows very funny and was not a fan. 

Yet Fielder’s emotionally empathetic persona and intelligence turn out to be well suited for the Holmes interviews. He is a surprisingly good, probing interviewer in despite, or maybe because of, his sometimes odd or tactless questioning. He presses forward, challenging Liz when she gives vague, sometimes surprisingly puerile, or hard to swallow answers. And Liz herself, turns out to be either a truly first-rate actress or some kind of very smart, sophisticated, woman, but one who is more than a little off, kind-of broken somehow. For one example, she does not seem to understand verbal humor – and I don’t mean just subtle stuff. In a widely retold moment in the film, she watches Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s On First” routine, which she'd never even heard of previously, but doesn't laugh at all and professes to not “get” the running joke. Or again, when she claims never to have lied in her life, and Fielder responds with skeptical astonishment, Liz doesn't understand why her statement is so singularly uncommon.

Evans is another story. He’s not the prime subject, but he’s a part of the story too if only because of how his relationship with Liz might reflect on our sense of her. They met in 2017 as Theranos was falling apart amid numerous investigations. Early in 2018 they became engaged. It is unclear (like so much else in this story) whether or not they are married. In 2019 several publications reported that the two were secretly married; and Evans calls Liz his wife. But in 2025, she told People magazine that they are not married. Liz was previously in a relationship with guy called Sunny Balwani whom she met while a student at Stanford in 2002, and  she entered into a romantic relationship with him the next year -  around the time she dropped out of Stanford to start Theranos. He eventually became COO  - responsible for the day-to-day operation of the company  - and sat on its board of directors, where he remained until 2016, when he left amid the mounting scandals. He’s serving time now too.  Balwani was 19 years older than Liz, and she says, very controlling and abusive. At her trial, she blamed many of the problems with the company on him. 

In contrast to Balwani, Evans is several years younger than Liz, and there are significant questions about him as well – crucially, why did he decide to get serious with this person, who he knew from the outset was at the center of a tawdry, very public corporate fraud case? He says he just fell madly in love.  Not unlike Balwami though, and based on the evidence on screen in  You Can See Everything,  Evans is clearly the alpha in their partnership. And he comes across as a highly controlling person himself.  So what’s that all about?

During the course of watching You Can See Everything, my sympathies and my beliefs about Elizabeth Holmes kept flipping all over the place. She is a fascinating enigma and so is her story. Is she so good at the con that she’s able to give a remarkable sustained performance as a possibly neurodivergent innocent victim, pulling the wool over Fielder and his team (and us) in a shoot lasting most of every day for over a month? Can we really know/understand, even after hours of conversation, someone else’s mind? Or have Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim edited the material so as to play some kind of ‘gotcha’ game with us? 

 You Can See Everything  is an intriguing headscratcher of the highest order. Which is why there is so much talk about it. This most unusual, sensational movie well worth seeing. 

2 hours 54 minutes

Grade: A

In theaters nationwide.