You Can See Everything review: Did Nathan Fielder get played by Elizabeth Holmes?

SPOILER WARNING: Major plot developments discussed.

KAZOOWATCH RATING: WITHHELD

My family and I are enormous Nathan Fielder fans. We loved the first season of The Rehearsal so much that we went back and watched every episode of Nathan for You. His awkward, cringe-inducing comedy is damn near perfection. There’s something about the way his mind works that makes the weird little AuDHD kid in me feel validated. Like maybe I’m not the only person in the world who thinks this way.

I love Nathan Fielder. But that doesn’t mean I believe he can do no wrong. I made it through about an episode and a half of The Curse before giving up, so my admiration certainly has its limits.

In preparation for You Can See Everything, my wife and I went down the Elizabeth Holmes rabbit hole. We watched Hulu’s The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as the disgraced Theranos founder, and thought it was excellent. In fact, I need to remember to go back to KazooWatch and give that series the HELL YEAH rating it deserves.

That decision is easy. What isn’t easy is trying to review You Can See Everything objectively, because I’m still seething.

The film, co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, just delivered the second-largest opening weekend for a documentary in history, behind only Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 from 2004. Critics are practically falling over themselves to praise it. And here I am, wondering whether I just watched a masterpiece or an incredibly talented filmmaker get played like a fiddle.

From the beginning, Nathan had me.

The way he uses silence to make Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, uncomfortable is absolutely mesmerizing. He lets them talk, lets them stumble, and gives them enough room to accidentally reveal things they probably shouldn’t. It’s classic Fielder, and it’s brilliant.

I was enthralled by the premise. Somehow, Nathan Fielder had found himself with extraordinary access to one of America’s most notorious corporate fraudsters. Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding Theranos investors in 2022 and sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison. Now, here she was, inviting cameras into her private life just before going away.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a bit, apparently.

As the film progresses, the image of this incredible, happenstance documentary begins to crumble. That’s not even their home. They rented it for the documentary. Billy is dictating what can and cannot be discussed, shutting down takes he doesn’t like, and appearing to control practically everything happening around him.

He’s hiding something. Or at least, that’s certainly what we’re being led to believe.

And that’s where this incredible documentary started to fall apart for me.

We’re watching two people who appear willing to manipulate absolutely everything around them, including their own portrayal in the movie we’re watching. Elizabeth Holmes even makes the astonishing claim that she has never told a lie in her life.

Never?

Come on, Elizabeth.

Her explanations of the Theranos technology make even less sense. Apparently, when Holmes told people that her revolutionary blood-testing machine could perform all those medical tests, she meant that it COULD do them, provided the necessary science existed to make them possible.

So essentially, she was selling the concept of a plan.

That’s not how this works! You cannot sell people technology that doesn’t perform as advertised and then insist that everyone else misunderstood what you meant by the word “could.”

Nathan seems to recognize the absurdity of this explanation, eventually showing Holmes the classic Abbott and Costello routine Who’s on First? in an attempt to illustrate how ridiculous their conversations have become.

And she doesn’t get it.

Nathan Fielder is a master of subtlety. His comedy lives in the uncomfortable spaces between what people say, what they mean, and what they actually believe. That’s precisely why I love his work.

But the masses are not necessarily masters of subtlety. Not everyone recognizes satire, and not everyone notices when a filmmaker is asking them to question what they’re seeing rather than accept it.

Sometimes people take the images in front of them at face value.

And when your subject is Elizabeth Holmes, ambiguity can become a very dangerous thing.

I worry that this film, whether intentionally or not, gives one of the most notorious figures in recent corporate fraud a fresh opportunity to reframe herself as a misunderstood victim.

Perhaps that’s an unfair criticism. Perhaps Nathan is several steps ahead of me, and the fact that I’m sitting here furious, confused, and questioning everything is exactly what he intended.

Maybe the joke is on me.

Then again, there’s another possibility. Maybe halfway through making this movie, Fielder realized he didn’t have the documentary he thought he was making and decided to construct a different story from the pieces he had.

And honestly, that would be pretty Nathan Fielder, too.

I will absolutely give credit where credit is due. Bringing Amanda Seyfried into the documentary to reenact Elizabeth Holmes is an inspired decision, and watching her become part of Nathan’s increasingly bizarre investigation is fascinating. It’s the kind of elaborate, reality-bending experiment that made The Rehearsal so remarkable in the first place.

Those sequences alone made the film worth watching, even when I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the larger story.

Maybe that’s the brilliance here. Maybe this isn’t really a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes at all. Maybe it’s about the impossibility of separating truth from performance when absolutely everyone involved has something to gain.

Including the filmmaker.

That’s a fascinating idea. It might even be a brilliant one.

But I keep returning to the same uncomfortable question: Is Fielder exposing Elizabeth Holmes’s manipulation, or has he accidentally become part of it?

And if the answer is supposed to be that we can never know, I’m not entirely convinced that’s good enough.

So, for the first time since I started reviewing movies, I’m not giving this one a rating. Not yet.

I need to sit with it. I need to digest what I saw, reconsider what Nathan might have been trying to accomplish, and decide whether my frustration is evidence of a failed documentary or proof of an extraordinarily successful one.

Because right now, this is either one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, or an incredibly elaborate waste of three hours.

And somehow, I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s both.

I’m hoping for brilliance, Nathan. I really am.

Because I want to see more of the best of you.

RATING: PENDING. I NEED TO THINK ABOUT THIS ONE.