This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the new documentary You Can See Everything premiered, it immediately plunged viewers into a disorienting, labyrinthine psychological landscape that felt less like a traditional non-fiction feature and more like waking up inside a multi-layered dream within a dream. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the nearly three-hour film chronicles the final weeks of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before she reports to federal prison. To call the film winding and twisting is an understatement; it operates on a multitude of layers, blending Fielder’s signature Dadaist, boundaryless approach to documentary subjects with Holmes’s hypnotic affect. Whether that affect represents highly effective gaslighting or a blinding, self-deluded earnestness remains an open question, leaving viewers struggling to find solid ground even long after the credits roll.
What happens when you take two inherently unreliable narrators—or three, if you include Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-camera persona undergoes a dizzying metamorphosis from protective, naive tech bro to unscrupulous grifter—put them in a metaphorical jar, and shake them vigorously? The result is that the more questions the documentary asks, the further the truth drifts out of reach. Watching the film feels akin to staring fixedly at a Magic Eye image, slightly crossing your eyes in a desperate bid to make out the hidden three-dimensional subject, only to never quite manage to see it clearly. Eventually, a lingering anxiety sets in, making you wonder if your perception might just get stuck that way permanently.
While the wider cultural discourse surrounding the film is already abundant and multifaceted, one particular micro-moment has captured the attention of food and culture observers alike: an unassuming scene involving eggs.
If you are familiar with the distinct hallmarks of Fielderian programming, you know that the comedian and filmmaker is notoriously prone to hyperfixating on seemingly mundane, everyday details that later return to completely upend audience expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such pivotal detail is observed during a domestic exchange between Holmes and Evans as they prepare breakfast together in their rental home. How much vital psychological subtext can genuinely be gleaned from watching someone make breakfast? According to this documentary, a remarkable amount.
During the first half of the film, Fielder is fully embedded in the household of Holmes and Evans, who inexplicably invited the documentary crew to document their private lives just before Holmes’s incarceration. How and why they agreed to this arrangement remains entirely incomprehensible to anyone familiar with Fielder’s extensive body of work and reputation for subversion. Throughout this portion, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn toward Holmes. She seems utterly intent on convincing the filmmakers—and Fielder specifically—that she is actually a sweet, deeply misunderstood victim of circumstance, rather than a Machiavellian con artist who defrauded millions from investors and put patients at risk.
Frankly, aspects of this carefully curated claim feel surprisingly convincing in the moment. Viewers are invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded, domestic moments, including a scene in which she makes breakfast alongside Evans. As Fielder interviews her, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera lingers on her feeble, uninspired whisking technique. Then, after a few awkward seconds, another set of hands abruptly enters the frame: those of Evans. Without uttering a single word, he takes the bowl and fork directly from Holmes and begins whipping the eggs with considerably greater, more aggressive fervor.
Now, backseat driving in the kitchen is hardly an uncommon phenomenon among domestic couples, though it is often viewed as a fast track to minor bickering and household tension. Evans notably tells Fielder at one point that he and Holmes “never fight,” while Holmes is equally emphatic that she has never lied in her life—statements that only reinforce their status as deeply unreliable narrators. What is far less common, or at least generally considered quite rude and socially aggressive, is the act of physically grabbing something out of your partner’s hands mid-task to forcibly take over. Fielder immediately points this out, asking Evans why he felt such an acute compulsion to snatch the eggs away. Holmes casually explains that Evans simply doesn’t like the way she mixes them and firmly believes he can do it better.
It is a tiny, fleeting interaction, but a remarkably revealing one. Evans feels entirely comfortable taking total control of a task Holmes is currently performing, doing so without even asking, and he appears largely oblivious to how his domineering behavior might come across on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears thoroughly accustomed to this kind of intrusion, offering a passive explanation rather than an objection or sign of offense. Granted, unlike the sustained and unblinking eye contact that became a trademark of her corporate days, beating eggs does not appear to be one of Ms. Holmes’s strong suits. Typically, one is expected to whisk eggs vigorously to aerate them properly and render them fluffy for a scramble or an omelet.
Yet, because this is Elizabeth Holmes, the viewer is forced to ask deeper questions: Could this actually be a calculated case of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, wishing to avoid the mundane task of beating the eggs altogether, she intentionally performs it insufficiently so that Evans feels compelled to take over? Is she truly being controlled, or is she brilliantly managing to get someone else to do her work for her, as she allegedly did for years in the corporate sphere? Or perhaps this is merely further evidence of her distinct way of thinking—that she genuinely does not understand the conventional, "right" way to beat a simple breakfast ingredient.
Throughout the interviews featured in the film, Holmes portrays the chaotic Theranos years as a period during which she was manipulated and controlled by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She consistently maintains that her ultimate intentions were noble and designed to benefit humanity, regardless of the devastating real-world consequences for investors and the patients who received dangerous, unreliable test results. Whether she genuinely believes this revisionist account of her own history, or simply knows how to sell it with practiced earnestness, remains one of the film’s central, unresolved mysteries. Equally mysterious is the true extent to which her romantic relationships lead her to willingly take the fall for the actions of worse men in her life.
These complex questions reverberate powerfully into the second half of the documentary. With Holmes now serving her federal prison sentence, the film introduces a series of deeply unsettling revelations regarding Billy Evans. Viewers learn that he holds power of attorney over Holmes and has been actively using her X account to publish bizarre, profanity-laced remarks that seem entirely incongruent with her own meticulously cultivated manner of speaking. Suddenly, the seemingly benign egg-beating scene takes on a much darker hue, looking less like a quirky domestic moment and more like an early indicator that Evans is far more domineering and controlling than the protective-partner persona he initially projected.
His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be genuine on some psychological level, but it is exceptionally difficult to reconcile that notion with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another bizarre entrepreneur’s obsessive emulation of Theranos. Furthermore, there is his apparent passive acceptance of the unsettling possibility that her artificial intelligence-generated likeness could be exploited to create pornography or other digital content completely antithetical to her personal interests.
And yet, even as Evans emerges as an increasingly unsavory character, Holmes herself remains frustratingly inscrutable. Does she actually know what he is doing on the outside? Does she actively approve of these maneuvers? Is he simply exploiting her vulnerable legal and personal circumstances for his own ends, or are they working in tandem toward a shared objective—whether reputational, monetary, or otherwise? The documentary offers a kaleidoscopic array of evidence supporting competing interpretations, leaving open the possibility that even if Holmes is currently being dominated by her partner, she may be entirely content with that dynamic.
What is truly extraordinary about Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary is its optical-illusion-like layers of constructed and deconstructed "truth." Despite the film’s many harrowing, unblinking close-ups capturing microexpressions, there is a stark gulf between what Holmes and Evans explicitly say, what they do, what they have done in the past, and what they plan to do next—such as reportedly launching a Theranos 2.0 venture ominously named Haemanthus. Hovering over all of this is Fielder’s own established history as a provocateur, a faux-earnest performance artist and magician who will go to virtually any lengths to actualize a conceptual project, and who remains remarkably capable of keeping a stone-cold straight face through any scenario imaginable.
Sincerity is a luxury none of these subjects can afford, and we are left to question Fielder’s own motivations as well. There are several moments in the film where viewers—including groups of moviegoers experiencing it together in theaters—are left wondering if there is a palpable, lingering sexual chemistry between the filmmaker and Holmes, and whether Fielder might ever cross that ethical line. Even if he did, audiences are left divided over whether such an action would stem from genuine human connection or represent yet another layer of elaborate performance art, blurring the barriers between reality and staging until nothing concrete remains.
Ultimately, the film’s most revealing moments are the ones that feel entirely off-script for everyone involved: a fleeting facial expression, an odd word choice dropping unexpectedly into an otherwise emphatic statement, or a quiet series of gestures exchanged over a simple bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects have willingly invited cameras into their private lives to be watched, yet there are precious few moments when they seem to truly forget the lens is there. Those rare, unscripted instances provide the closest possible insight into their reality. Frankly, that reality remains stubbornly murky, and that ambiguity appears to be both the core point and the underlying irony of the film’s title.
You Can See Everything elevates Nathan Fielder’s artistic reputation far beyond that of a mere master of cringe humor, revealing a profound glimmer of cinematic genius. The story feels almost fateful in its ability to showcase his unique gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities of how human beings interact with one another behind closed doors. Even when an overarching conceptual idea is massive in scale, the documentary reminds us that it is the smallest, most granular details that matter the most. And in a film that promises viewers they can see everything, we ultimately learn that the burden is entirely on us to look closely—and even then, what we think we see might look entirely different when viewed in another light.
