This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
When the lights go down and the screen flickers to life for You Can See Everything—the boundary-pushing new documentary chronicling the final weeks of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before her federal prison sentence, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—viewers are immediately plunged into an alternate reality. Leaving the theater feels akin to trying to punch one’s way out of a paper bag or waking up disoriented from a deeply layered, Inception-style dream within a dream. Describing the winding, twisting, nearly three-hour cinematic journey to someone entirely unfamiliar with its rich layers of context is an uphill battle. It requires navigating Fielder’s signature Dadaist, boundary-free approach to his subjects alongside Holmes’s hypnotic affect—a demeanor that continuously oscillates between highly effective gaslighting and blinding, self-deluded earnestness, leaving audiences questioning where the line between the two actually lies.
What happens when you take two inherently unreliable narrators—or three, if you factor in Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-screen presence drastically shifts from a protective, naive tech bro to a profoundly unscrupulous grifter—put them into a metaphorical jar, and vigorously shake them? The inevitable result is that the harder you look for the truth, the further out of reach it drifts. Watching the film feels distressingly similar to staring at a classic Magic Eye image, slightly crossing your eyes while desperately trying to force the hidden three-dimensional subject to materialize, all the while harboring a creeping anxiety that your eyes might permanently stick that way.
While the broader discourse surrounding the film’s dizzying narrative choices, ethical ambiguities, and psychological depths is already abundant, one microscopic moment has captured the obsessive attention of viewers: the eggs.
For anyone familiar with the hallmarks of Fielderian programming, it comes as no surprise that the filmmaker is perpetually prone to hyperfixating on seemingly mundane, trivial details that eventually return to completely upend audience expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such pivotal detail is observed during a seemingly innocuous exchange between Holmes and Evans as they attempt to make breakfast. How much profound psychological insight can realistically be gleaned from watching two people cook morning eggs? As it turns out, an extraordinary amount.
During the first half of the documentary, Fielder is fully embedded within the rental home of Holmes and Evans. The couple has inexplicably invited the filmmakers to document the high-stakes final weeks leading up to Holmes’s surrender to federal prison—an arrangement whose underlying rationale remains completely incomprehensible to anyone remotely familiar with Fielder’s prior body of work. Throughout this intimate window, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn toward Holmes. She appears entirely intent on convincing the documentary crew, and Fielder specifically, that she is not a Machiavellian mastermind who defrauded vulnerable investors and patients, but rather a sweet, deeply misunderstood victim of unfortunate circumstances.
Frankly, aspects of this carefully cultivated narrative feel genuinely convincing in the moment. The audience is invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded, domestic moments, including a scene in which she prepares breakfast alongside Evans. As Fielder interviews her, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera deliberately lingers on her feeble, lackluster whisking technique. Then, after a few seconds of awkward silence, a second set of hands enters the frame: those of Billy Evans. Without uttering a single word, he takes the bowl and the fork directly out of Holmes’s hands and begins whipping the eggs with a considerably greater, almost aggressive fervor.
Backseat driving in the domestic kitchen is hardly an uncommon phenomenon among couples, though it frequently serves as a fast track to petty bickering. Notably, Evans informs Fielder at one point that he and Holmes “never fight,” while Holmes remains adamantly emphatic that she has never lied in her entire life—once again cementing their status as profoundly unreliable narrators. However, what is considerably less common—or at least universally considered rather rude and socially aggressive—is forcefully grabbing an object out of your romantic partner’s hands mid-task just to take over entirely. Fielder seizes on this micro-interaction, politely asking Evans why he felt such a pressing need to usurp the egg-beating process. Holmes readily explains that Evans simply dislikes the way she mixes them and firmly believes he can do a better job.
It is a remarkably tiny interaction, yet it proves to be profoundly revealing. Evans feels completely comfortable asserting physical control over an activity Holmes is actively performing, doing so without even so much as asking, and he appears largely oblivious to how his domineering behavior might translate on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears entirely accustomed to this sort of boundary intrusion, offering a mild explanation rather than an objection or a flash of anger. Granted, unlike the sustained and unblinking eye contact that became her corporate signature, vigorous beating does not appear to be among Ms. Holmes’s hidden talents. Typically, culinary convention dictates that one must whip eggs with considerable vigor in order to properly aerate them, introducing air to make an omelet or scramble appropriately fluffy.
Yet, because the subject is Elizabeth Holmes, the viewer is forced to ask a darker question: Could this simply be a textbook case of weaponized incompetence? Is it entirely possible that, desperately wishing to avoid the tedious task of beating eggs herself, she intentionally performed the action with insufficient effort specifically to goad Evans into taking over? Is she truly being dominated by her partner, or is she brilliantly manipulating someone else into doing her dirty work for her? Or perhaps this serves as further evidence of her fundamentally “different” way of thinking—a cognitive disconnect where she genuinely does not grasp the culturally accepted, “right” way to beat a simple egg?
Throughout her interviews in the documentary, Holmes aggressively portrays the Theranos years as a dark chapter during which she was thoroughly manipulated by her former romantic partner and business partner, Sunny Balwani. She consistently maintains that her overarching intentions were ultimately benevolent and aimed at helping humanity, regardless of the devastating collateral consequences for investors and everyday patients who received dangerously unreliable medical test results. Whether she genuinely believes this revisionist account of her own history, or simply possesses an innate, terrifying talent for selling it, remains one of the film’s most enduring central mysteries. Equally mysterious is the degree to which her romantic patterns continuously lead her to willingly take the full fall for the catastrophic actions of worse men.
These haunting questions reverberate loudly into the second half of the documentary. Once Holmes is safely behind bars, the film pivots to reveal deeply unsettling information regarding Evans. It is uncovered that he holds power of attorney over Holmes and has been actively utilizing her official X account to publish bizarre, profanity-laced remarks that feel entirely incongruent with her own meticulously cultivated manner of speaking. Suddenly, the seemingly benign breakfast egg scene takes on a sinister new hue, looking less like a quirky domestic quirk and far more like an early, undeniable indicator that Evans is significantly more domineering than the protective, supportive partner persona he initially presented to the cameras.
While his ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be authentic on some deeply complex level, it becomes nearly impossible to reconcile with his willingness to license her likeness for billboards promoting another bizarre entrepreneur’s obsessive fixation on Theranos. Furthermore, it is difficult to square with his apparent acceptance of the horrifying possibility that her AI-generated digital likeness could easily be exploited to create unauthorized pornography or other content fundamentally antithetical to her personal and legal interests.
And yet, even as Evans steadily emerges as an increasingly unsavory and manipulative character, Holmes herself remains utterly inscrutable. Does she possess any awareness of what he is doing in her absence? Does she actively approve of these bizarre marketing maneuvers? Is he ruthlessly exploiting her uniquely vulnerable legal and social circumstances for his own gain, or are they quietly collaborating toward a shared, overarching objective—whether reputational, monetary, or otherwise? The documentary brilliantly offers kaleidoscopic, contradictory evidence for competing interpretations, including the unsettling possibility that even if Holmes is currently being dominated in her relationship, she may actually be entirely content with maintaining that dynamic.
What remains truly extraordinary about Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary is its optical-illusion-like stacking of subjective “truths.” Despite the film’s numerous harrowing close-ups capturing fleeting microexpressions, there is a perpetual chasm between what Holmes and Evans explicitly say, what they actually do, what they have done in the past, and what they secretly plan to do next—such as reportedly launching a spiritual successor to Theranos dubbed Haemanthus. Hovering over all of this is Fielder’s own established history as a brilliant provocateur, a faux-earnest psychological magician who will routinely go to virtually any absurd length to actualize a complex conceptual framework, maintaining a stone-cold straight face through virtually any conceivable scenario.
Naturally, knowing what we do about Fielder’s artistic methodology forces viewers to continuously question his own sincerity as well. There are several uncomfortable moments in the film where audience members find themselves wondering whether there is a palpable, lingering sexual chemistry between Fielder and Holmes, and whether the filmmaker might actually act upon it. If he were to cross that boundary, it remains entirely ambiguous whether such an action would stem from genuine human connection or function as just another layer of elaborate performance art, leaving one to wonder if any impermeable barrier even exists between those two concepts for Fielder anymore.
Ultimately, the documentary’s most revealing moments are precisely those that feel entirely off-script for everyone involved: a fleeting, unguarded facial expression, an odd word choice dropping awkwardly into an otherwise emphatic statement, or a series of tense gestures exchanged over a simple bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects have willingly invited themselves to be watched under a microscope, yet there are precious few instances where they genuinely seem to forget the cameras are rolling. Those rare, fragile instances are ostensibly when we are granted the clearest insight into their actual reality. Frankly, that reality remains stubbornly murky, and that ambiguity appears to be both the core point and the quiet irony embedded within the film’s title.
You Can See Everything successfully elevates Nathan Fielder’s critical reputation far beyond his legacy as merely a master of modern cringe humor, revealing a genuine glimmer of cinematic genius. The story feels almost fateful in its uncanny ability to showcase his unique creative gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness and infinite complexities of how human beings interact with one another under pressure. Even when tackling a monumental, culturally explosive narrative, the film reminds us that it is often the smallest, most mundane details that matter the most. And in a documentary that explicitly promises you can see everything, we ultimately learn that the burden rests entirely upon the audience to look closely—and that even when we do, what we see will inevitably shift the moment the light changes.
