Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Film Blurs Fact and Fiction

Nathan Fielder's new film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes blurs the lines between reality and fiction, and A24 is releasing it. The film arrives with an image that captures its method: Holmes with her child, Fielder looking on, in a frame credited to A24.

The premise is unmistakably provocative. A comedian-director known for staging awkward reality — Fielder built his reputation on works that stage real situations with real people — turns to one of the decade's most consequential business frauds. Holmes founded Theranos, claimed its technology could run hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood, and was convicted of defrauding investors. Fielder's film does not simply dramatize that record. It bends it.

According to the source review, the film can be "genuinely gripping." That is the strongest verdict available: the picture works as cinema. But the review adds a corrective that matters more. "The truth might not be so ambiguous."

What does the blending of fact and fiction achieve?

The reviewer's framing suggests a tension at the film's core. Fielder's method invites viewers to question what they are watching — which moments are documented, which are invented, which sit in between. Applied to Holmes, that method produces entertainment. It also risks softening a case that ended in a criminal conviction.

Holmes is not an ambiguous figure in the legal record. She was tried, convicted and sentenced for fraud at Theranos. A film that blurs fact and fiction around her story gains stylistic power. It may lose moral precision.

The takeaway: the film's ambiguity is a directorial choice, not a description of reality.

Why does the distinction matter now?

Holmes remains a fixture of popular culture — the subject of books, documentaries, a Hulu series and now a feature film that hybridizes the record. Each retelling reshapes public memory of the case.

Fielder's version is different in kind. Where earlier adaptations separated documented fact from dramatic license, his film deliberately merges them. The review's caution — that the truth "might not be so ambiguous" — reads as a warning against treating the fraud itself as an open question.

The image A24 circulated, showing Holmes with her child as Fielder looks on, signals the film's register: intimate, staged, unresolved.

The takeaway: audiences should watch the film as art, not as a verdict on the facts.

Fielder's film will now test whether a hybrid of comedy, drama and deception can hold up against a documented fraud — and whether viewers can keep the two apart.

By Elena Vasquez