You Can See Everything

November 6 – 8

Fri Nov 6 – 7:00 pm
Sat Nov 7 – 1:30 & 7:00 pm
Sun Nov 8 – 1:30 & 7:00 pm

Rated 14A – 2hr 51min
Documentary / Biography

You Can See Everything is a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder currently serving her 11-year prison sentence for fraud crimes, including deceiving high-profile investors (like Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison) who poured $945 million into Theranos. The start-up that put Holmes on international magazine covers and dubbed her the next Steve Jobs was supposed to disrupt the health lab industry by equipping patients with compact self-test devices operated on a drop of blood.

A triumphant, riveting, and continually shape-shifting piece of creative non-fiction with curiosity and a playful sense of uncomfortable humor that will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Fielder’s work, it’s the kind of documentary that is persistently inquisitive and skeptical: both about its alarmingly wide-eyed subject who often refuses to blink, and the process of documentary filmmaking itself. When cameras are present, and an editor is in charge of weaving the captured footage, is the truth really nakedly present, or is it palatably performed? How much camera persistence is needed until the subject drops the act and shows their true colors? And despite what the title claims, can you really see everything?

Through Fielder’s interactions with Holmes, we learn that she genuinely thinks she’s never told a lie before, not even a white lie. No matter how much Fielder tries to explain with cold, hard facts and simple wording why she was deceitful, demolishing whatever Holmes chooses to believe in her head in the plainest terms possible, she just doesn’t get it. At one point, their increasingly hysterical and dead-end exchange resembles Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” comedy routine that neither Holmes nor Evans are familiar with. When Fielder plays it for them, Holmes neither gets it nor understands its relevance to the level of brain gymnastics she clearly performed to maintain her innocence.

Unblinking, faces inches apart, the famously dry purveyor of harebrained business schemes and the convicted fraudster appeared locked in a battle of wills. “Are you being real right now?” Fielder asked her, in a classically meta bit – could Fielder really have spent years filming a secret documentary with one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious pariahs?

You Can See Everything is a masterpiece of who’s playing who, the fragility and absurdities of trust, seemingly begotten by chance. Back in 2023, convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy and awaiting the start of her 11-year sentence in prison, Holmes, along with Evans – who appears to be her match made in heaven, as neither ever blink and are maybe always lying – sought out a film crew to document their life with their two young children, in an attempt to protest her innocence and, perhaps, rebrand for Theranos 2.0. For some reason, they chose Oppenheim, a documentarian whose distinctive style – hyper-saturation, tight frames, creeping zooms – exposes the eerie in the mundane, and Fielder, whose precise style of spectrum-y, extreme cringe means that no question will be off the table. As Fielder points out on camera, in one of several exquisitely blunt confrontations, it is an odd choice to allow a comedian famous for his business scams to make a documentary that will supposedly clear your name of arguably the most famous fraud scandal of the 2010s.