Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc Runs 174 Minutes and Refuses to Convict

By Grace Kim

Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" runs 174 minutes, and its real surprise isn't Holmes's bizarreness — it's the film's willingness to consider sympathy. The movie, co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim and premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, spends 34 days living with Holmes and her husband Billy Evans, plus years of further production after her incarceration. What it refuses to deliver is a verdict.

That's a deliberate design, and the filmmakers signaled it from the very first trailer. After minutes of Holmes smiling earnestly with a shaky head — suggesting what one reviewer calls "some kind of anxious palsy" — the reveal comes: she's simply rocking her baby with her extended leg. The scene sets the contract. Expect "IRL comedic shock and awe, tinged with lingering bits of poignance as Holmes turns out to be a human being… if a still-unfathomable one."

What does the film actually argue?

Not innocence. The documentary asks where the "invisible hooks in her impossibly strange life" might lie, rather than letting Holmes off any hooks. It sets out as a psychology mystery and ends more baffled than it began. As Variety's review puts it, by the end the film "makes solving the puzzle of UFOs seem like a cinch by comparison."

The crux arrives late, in a conversation between Fielder and a Very Famous A-List Personality whose identity A24 has asked viewers to treat as a spoiler. Fielder confesses his confusion: could Holmes possibly be as guilless as she appears, around the clock? The A-lister all but slaps him for it, suggesting Stockholm Syndrome. Some viewers will cheer her. Others will recognize their own split response — the empathic and cynical sides of the audience fighting it out inside a single viewer.

The Billy Evans problem

If the film has a villain, it's Evans, who "probably crosses the line into counting as one." He's candid, possibly genuinely in love with Holmes — yet the final hour delivers constant revelations about his conduct. He makes deals without her knowledge and runs a profane tweetstorm under her name that bears no resemblance to her known personality. The portrait of Holmes's passivity in the face of an aggressive "let me handle everything" man keeps growing more startling, the review notes, "and has to feel at least a little real for anyone with much first-hand human-race experience."

A feminist reading is available too. Early in the film, Holmes's father blurts out that things changed for his daughter after she was raped in college. Fielder offers one of his quietly startled reaction shots — a staple of the movie — and the topic never returns. The theme of powerful, controlling men recurs with Theranos co-founder Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani and dominates the present-day material.

Two scenes that break the enigma open

• Fielder asks Holmes if she's ever lied. She says no. Even the white-lies follow-up gets a no — while Fielder practically begs her to admit a single protective fib. "Probably 99.99% of the population would surrender at that point — evil geniuses most of all."
• Later, Fielder screens Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" sketch. Holmes has never heard of it, claims she gets the point, then finally admits she doesn't understand it at all. At which point, the review observes, you may start to wonder whether she is developmentally disabled in some way.

The reviewer lays out three possible explanations: (a) she is a simpleton; (b) she is a conniving sociopath brilliant at playing one; (c) somewhere between — a woman who has spent her life under the sway of controlling men, at the cost of her intellect, willpower and emotional development.

What does this change for the audience?

At Telluride's premiere Q&A — which attendees weren't allowed to record — Fielder said he and his team still struggled to define what they'd experienced, despite the film's title being literally true: the couple let them see nearly everything possible to see. The review's hunch is that Fielder came away believing Holmes is on the level, "to the extent that someone who sometimes seems like an AI program's idea of how a human should behave can be on the level."

Expect division. The review predicts a countdown until social media calls Fielder a "cuck" for falling prey to manipulation — while also arguing the film "deserve[s] the Best Picture nomination it's clearly lined up to get." In an era of hot takes, a luxuriously paced, inconclusive peering into one soul reads as a balm. The film's unsettling thesis, per the review: "the more you learn about someone, the less you might know how to think about them."