Three weeks ago, when a trailer dropped for a then-unknown Nathan Fielder project titled You Can See Everything, the internet exploded. The documentary it tensely teased was about the infamous Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and the time leading up to her bid in federal prison for fraud. It had been shot in secret for years with director Lance Oppenheim, and no one knew a thing. We were incredulous.
To say that excitement for the deeply under-wraps documentary was high would be insufficient. The logline is simple enough—34 days before Holmes went to prison, Fielder and a crew came and followed her every move. But if you know anything about Fielder’s or Oppenheim’s work, there’s always more under the hood. After a rapturous reception when the film premiered as the surprise screening at 2026’s Telluride Film Festival at the beginning of September, New York-based film fans were curious if it would premiere at the city’s annual film festival ahead of its October 16th release. And then there it was, announced on the NYFF slate for September 30, instantly the hottest tickets in town.
However, as one could have guessed, it immediately sold out for its local premiere at Alice Tully Hall, sending film and Fieldier fans into desperate frenzies to secure one of the theater’s 1,086 seats for the September 30 screening. Amongst the city’s film writers, crash-outs were copious and seemingly inevitable, testing all conceivable points of potential access to find a stub or a hook-up in any way possible—friends, friends of friends, resale, and ultimately the standby line, which had already begun to form Wednesday morning and snaked around the block by the 8 p.m. showtime. The lucky ones, like myself, who survived the queue or snagged a ticket by means nothing short of extraordinary, got a short intro for the film from Fielder and Oppenheim in their Sunday best, thanking the festival and NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim, who was Oppenheim’s professor.
Photo by Cindy Ord via Getty Images for FLC
As for the film itself, the 3-hour journey of You Can See Everything is best approached knowing nothing at all. If there’s a premise worth mentioning, it’s this: Holmes and husband Billy Evans invite Fielder and Oppenheim to Del Mar, California to document the days leading up to Holmes’ 11-year, 3-month prison sentence at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan in Texas, which also housed Jen Shah, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star who allegedly became friends with Holmes and Ghislane Maxwell. What follows, as Fielder interviews Holmes and Evans and goes deeper into whether the founder is being honest about her involvement in Theranos, warps into an utter fever dream about truth-telling, the documentarian/subject relationship, the surveillance state, the patriarchy, and relationships; it’s a porous, evolving, hilarious, enraging, and nerve-wracking thing, with a final act that ranks amongst the best communal theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. Despite the runtime, you’ll revisit it and reinterpret it over and over again.
Photo by Kerensa Cadenas
The slippery nature of You Can See Everything was born of the experience making the film. “It wasn’t until we started shooting that moments would happen,” Fielder said, sitting with Oppenheim and Lim for the post-screening Q&A. “We’d completely disagree on what something meant to us and what we thought was happening. Then we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting. If we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”
Curiosity and general bafflement carried from the theater to the afterparty at Waverly Inn, where people mingled over martinis, tried to make sense of the film, and collectively continued the investigation of its subject, who was either truthful or one of the greatest liars of our time. Fielder, along with Oppenheim, held court at the West Village haunt, where fans of his will be happy, relieved even, to know his dates to the premiere were his parents. A surreal feeling filled the air at the party, lingering from the movie, as people raved to its creators and asked for their own personal thoughts about what they had made.
Some of that feeling may have wafted over from the streets outside Alice Tully Hall, where a light-up truck with a “Free Elizabeth Holmes” sign cast a wild glow, and a bunch of dudes handed out corresponding shirts and postcards that read, “Just Blood: See Why Elizabeth Holmes is Innocent,” after the screening. It would have been easy to assume these were part of a marketing gimmick. A24 is, after all, known for its unique campaigns and free merch that almost immediately ends up on the secondary market. But the consensus culled from party chatter attempted to debunk the theory, claiming instead it was a kind of counter-programming funded by a sinister elsewhere mentioned in the documentary. Armed with our tees and buttons, we left with far more questions than answers.
The post Trying to See Everything in Nathan Fielder’s Mind-Scrambling Elizabeth Holmes Doc appeared first on BKMAG.
