You Can See Everything review

YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING: 

NATHAN FIELDER AND LANCE OPPENHEIM STAY AT ELIZABETH HOLMES’ HOUSE, AND ONE HELL OF A DOCUMENTARY COMES OUT OF IT! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: **** out of 4

A24

Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything

 

            The untold story of infamous Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holme,s in the days leading up to her prison sentence comes to light in You Can See Everything, a documentary film from A24 and directors Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal, The Curse, The History of Concrete) and Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Primetime). Gotta admit, I don’t usually review documentaries that often, but this movie was getting hyped up like mad, and flocks of people were going out to the theater to watch this 3-hour documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, so I had to know what all the fuss was about. 

            Prior to seeing this, I watched the HBO documentary film, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, in order to get proper context about who exactly Elizabeth Holmes is and the shit that went down at her company, which is a solid documentary in its own right. Definitely check it out if you have HBO Max before WB/Paramount takes it away. 

            But y’all don’t care about what I have to say about that film; you want to know my thoughts on this one, and…yeah, this movie is quite a ride. I do have some issues with the runtime, but I was fascinated and engaged throughout…and this is coming from someone who just found out about Elizabeth Holmes recently. 

            The film follows Fielder, Oppenheim, and their documentary crew being invited by Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, to document their lives at a rental beach house in California 31 days before Holmes begins her eleven-year prison sentence for defrauding investors with her company, Theranos. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon soon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. 

            The film also features Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Les Misérables, The Housemaid), who portrayed Holmes in The Dropout miniseries. 

            Overall, You Can See Everything is a mind-warping and exhilarating experience which I don’t usually call a documentary, but this film did exactly that. The movie just has this unnerving and foreboding tone all throughout the runtime, complete with an ominous music score by Ari Balouzian, as if you, the audience, are with the documentarians and this manipulative and potentially insane person. 

            You’re never fully sure whether or not Fielder is being scammed by Holmes or if he actually is uncovering something about her, er which I find very interesting, especially for a documentary where people are expected to get their facts right. But because Elizabeth Holmes is such an unstable and manipulative person who may or may not blur the truth, the film crew’s interactions with her are both fascinating and genuinely chilling. 

            The movie also focuses quite a bit on Holmes’ family,y namely her husband, Billy, who starts off as being very charming and supportive, but over the course of the film, he has some sinister goals of his own regarding the production. Honestly, the second half of the film, after Holmes goes to prison, focuses a lot on Billy, what his motives are, and whether or not Holmes is in on it,t and the movie is black and white about it with no clear answer, which is so unconventional for a documentary. 

            I don’t really know much about Nathan Fielder outside of the fact that he’s a comedian with experience with documentary-ish filmmaking, and having him take on a project like this and injecting comedy into realism, I thought, was very clever. There’s this great scene where he’s showing Elizabeth an Abbott and Costello sketch to see how she reacts to it and if she understands the joke, and her reaction is…odd. 

            I was never bored during this and was invested and engaged throughout, but I will admit this doesn’t need to be 3 hours long. It should be long because a lot of stuff happens in the film, but there are scenes that could be trimmed down a bit and other details that could have been fleshed out more. 

            My writing cannot do this movie justice because much of its enjoyment comes from the shock factor of what you’re watching and how unpredictable it gets. You Can See Everything is a riveting, informative, and above all, haunting documentary on one of the most narcissistic, mentally unhinged, and infamous businesswomen in the country that deserves to be seen. I won’t soon be forgetting this unsettling descent into Holmes’ psyche anytime soon.