This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the lights go down and the screen flickers to life, stepping into You Can See Everything—the startling new documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—feels less like watching a standard cinematic profile and more like waking up from an Inception-esque dream within a dream. Days after witnessing the winding, twisting, nearly three-hour film, viewers are left with the distinct sensation that their brains are trying to punch their way out of a paper bag. It remains remarkably difficult to describe the sprawling feature to someone unfamiliar with its many layers of context. On one side stands Fielder, celebrated for his Dadaist, boundaryless approach to subverting his subjects. On the other stands Holmes, wielding a hypnotic affect that continuously oscillates between highly effective gaslighting and blinding, self-deluded earnestness. Which is it? Long after the credits roll, the answer remains frustratingly out of reach.
What happens when you take two notoriously unreliable narrators—and make that three, if you include Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-camera persona morphs over the course of the runtime from a protective, naive tech bro into an unscrupulous grifter—put them in a metaphorical jar, and shake them vigorously? The result is a disorienting sociological experiment where the more questions are asked, the further the underlying truth drifts away. Watching the documentary is much like staring at a Magic Eye image, slightly crossing your eyes, desperate to make out the hidden three-dimensional subject but never quite managing to see it. Eventually, you start worrying your eyes might get stuck that way, permanently locked in a state of cognitive dissonance.
While the cultural discourse surrounding the film is already abundant and fiercely debated across social media and film forums, one remarkably mundane detail keeps drawing the focus of critics and audiences alike: the eggs.
If you are familiar with the signature hallmarks of Fielderian programming, you know that Fielder possesses a unique knack for hyperfixating on seemingly trivial, everyday details that later return to completely upend viewers’ expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such detail is observed in a deceptively simple exchange between Holmes and Evans as they attempt to make breakfast together. How much insight can genuinely be gleaned from watching someone cook a morning meal? According to this documentary, a staggering amount.
In the first half of the film, Fielder is fully embedded in the rental home of Holmes and Evans. The couple has inexplicably invited the documentary crew to document the tense final weeks before Holmes must report to federal prison to begin serving her sentence. Exactly how and why they agreed to such a high-risk arrangement remains utterly incomprehensible if they possessed even a passing familiarity with Fielder’s previous work. During this domestic window, 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, profoundly misunderstood victim of circumstance, rather than the Machiavellian con woman who defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Frankly, aspects of this claim feel unsettlingly convincing at times. Viewers are invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded moments, including a scene in which she attempts to make breakfast with Evans. As Fielder interviews her from across the kitchen, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera deliberately lingers on her feeble, uninspired whisking technique. Then, after a few awkward seconds, another set of hands enters the frame: those of Evans. Without uttering a single word, he unceremoniously takes the bowl and fork from Holmes and begins whipping the eggs with considerably greater, almost aggressive fervor.
Backseat driving in the kitchen is hardly an uncommon phenomenon among domestic couples, though it certainly acts as a fast track to minor domestic bickering. Earlier in the project, Evans informs Fielder that he and Holmes “never fight,” while Holmes is equally emphatic that she has never lied in her life. Once again, the audience is confronted with unreliable narrators. However, what is far less common—or at least generally considered rude, domineering, and socially aggressive—is aggressively snatching a culinary tool out of your romantic partner’s hands mid-task simply to take over. Fielder points this out in real time, asking Evans directly why he felt the immediate need to wrest control of the eggs. Holmes promptly steps in with an explanation, noting that Evans simply doesn’t like the way she mixes them and genuinely believes he can do it better.
It is a tiny, fleeting interaction, but it is also remarkably revealing. Evans clearly feels completely comfortable taking control of a task Holmes is currently performing, doing so without even so much as asking permission, and he appears largely oblivious to how his domineering behavior might come across to an active film crew. Holmes, meanwhile, appears thoroughly accustomed to this sort of domestic intrusion, offering a mild explanation rather than an objection or a flash of anger. Granted, unlike her well-documented history of sustained and unblinking eye contact, beating eggs does not appear to be one of Ms. Holmes’s hidden strong suits. Typically, a cook must whisk vigorously to aerate the mixture, introducing air to make the final scramble or omelet light and fluffy, whereas Holmes’s approach resembles a reluctant paddle in a puddle.
Yet, because this is Elizabeth Holmes, viewers are forced to ask a deeper, more cynical question: Could this simply be a calculated case of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, wishing to avoid the manual labor of beating the eggs, she intentionally performs the task insufficiently so that Evans will inevitably step in and take over? Is she being subtly controlled, or is she brilliantly manipulating someone else into doing her work for her? Or, perhaps more troublingly, is this genuine evidence of her famously “different” way of thinking—a cognitive blind spot where she truly does not understand the conventional, physical mechanics of the task?
Throughout the interviews featured in the film, Holmes paints the chaotic Theranos years as a dark period during which she was manipulated and emotionally controlled by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She steadfastly maintains that her core intentions were ultimately noble and meant to benefit humanity, regardless of the devastating consequences for financial investors and the patients who received dangerous, unreliable medical test results. Whether she genuinely believes this revisionist account of her own history, or whether she simply retains her legendary ability to sell an impossible narrative, remains one of the film’s central, unresolved mysteries. Equally mysterious is the degree to which her romantic partnerships consistently lead her to act as the public face—and take the ultimate fall—for the actions of worse men.
These haunting questions reverberate loudly into the second half of the documentary. Once Holmes is safely behind bars, the film shifts focus and uncovers some deeply unsettling revelations about Billy Evans. It is revealed that he holds power of attorney over Holmes and has been actively using her official X account to broadcast bizarre, profanity-laced remarks that seem entirely incongruent with her characteristic manner of speaking and public persona. Suddenly, the seemingly innocuous breakfast scene featuring the bowl of eggs takes on a darker hue, looking less like a quirky domestic squabble and more like an early warning sign that Evans is far more domineering and controlling than the protective-partner persona he meticulously presented to the cameras.
His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be genuine on some psychological level, but it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another bizarre-seeming entrepreneur’s nascent Theranos obsession. It is equally hard to justify his apparent acceptance of the possibility that her AI-generated likeness could potentially be utilized to create unauthorized pornography or other digital content entirely antithetical to her personal interests.
Even as Evans emerges as an increasingly unsavory and self-serving character, Holmes herself remains utterly inscrutable. Does she actually know what he is doing on the outside? Does she tacitly approve of these bizarre maneuvers? Is he blatantly exploiting her compromised legal and social circumstances, or are the two of them actively working together toward a shared, calculated objective—whether reputational, financial, or otherwise? The documentary offers kaleidoscopic, contradictory evidence for competing interpretations, floating the uncomfortable notion that even if Holmes is currently being dominated by her partner, she may actually be entirely content with that lopsided 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 featuring numerous harrowing close-ups of microexpressions and tense silences, there is a vast chasm between what Holmes and Evans say, what they do, what they have done in the past, and what they plan to do next, which reportedly includes launching a bizarre Theranos 2.0 venture named Haemanthus. Compounding this labyrinth is Fielder’s own well-established public history as a provocative performance artist and faux-earnest magician who will go to virtually any absurd length to actualize a conceptual project, all while maintaining a stone-cold, deadpan expression through the most surreal scenarios imaginable.
Knowing Fielder’s history naturally forces viewers to question his own sincerity throughout the production. There are several uncomfortable moments in the film where audience members cannot help but wonder if there is a palpable, strange sexual chemistry flickering between him and Holmes, and whether Fielder might actually act upon it. If he did, viewers are left utterly divided on whether such a turn would be genuine or merely another layer of elaborate performance art, or whether Fielder himself even recognizes any remaining boundaries between those two states.
Ultimately, the documentary’s most revealing moments are those that feel completely off-script for everyone involved: a fleeting micro-expression of doubt, an odd word choice in an otherwise emphatic statement, or a series of awkward physical gestures exchanged over a simple bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects have explicitly invited cameras to watch them, yet there are rare instances where they seem to momentarily forget they are being observed. Those brief flashes are ostensibly when viewers are granted the clearest insight into their reality.
Frankly, that reality remains stubbornly murky, and that ambiguity appears to be both the central point and the driving irony behind the film’s provocative title. You Can See Everything elevates Nathan Fielder’s artistic reputation far beyond that of a mere master of cringe humor, revealing a genuine glimmer of auteur genius. The story feels almost fateful in its ability to showcase his unique gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities of how flawed humans interact with one another under pressure. Even when a concept is impossibly vast, it turns out that the smallest, most mundane details matter the most. And in a documentary that explicitly promises you can see everything, audiences learn that the burden is entirely upon them to look closely—and even then, what we think we see might look entirely different in another light.
