The real villain of ‘You Can See Everything’ is not Elizabeth Holmes

NOTE: This review contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”

Sometimes the best journalists are those who don’t even pretend to be journalists. The late Anthony Bourdain was one of these accidental heralds, as was “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen before the gonzo comedian rose to fame, whatever his alter ego. Let’s go ahead and add writer/performer Nathan Fielder to the list. You and I know Fielder best from “Nathan For You” and “The Rehearsal.” Everyone’s about to know him for “You Can See Everything,” a team effort with documentarian Lance Oppenheim that is not only the best film of 2026 so far, but also one of the finest works of journalism I’ve ever seen.

This film arrives in theaters with a lot of deserved Oscar buzz. But in this case, a simple cinematic award seems insufficient in terms of recognition. As far as I’m concerned, this thing deserves a Pulitzer (categories be damned). And maybe a Nobel Prize.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In case you haven’t seen the trailer for the film, “You Can See Everything” is a portrait of the infamous Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted in 2022 of defrauding her company’s investors and is currently in prison in Texas. You can read all about Holmes in John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood,” an essential ticker to the Theranos scandal. The book recounts not only how Holmes led people to believe that his company’s revolutionary blood-testing equipment worked (it didn’t), but also how the culture of Silicon Valley inspired Holmes and, in some cases, perhaps encouraged her. The Theranos scandal was one of the most high-profile financial scandals of this century, and Holmes was its haunting and relentless face.

Holmes remained in the dark for years after her misdeeds came to light, until she and her fiancé, Billy Evans, agreed to let Fielder and Oppenheim into their neglected rental cottage in Del Mar for weeks and film the couple (and their two very cute children) as they prepared for Holmes to report to prison. Fielder and Oppenheim were allowed to film the Holmes family almost 24/7, with Fielder at one point agreeing to stay with the family for an extended period of time. Hence the title of the film. Indeed, you will see everything. Almost too much of everything, considering this documentary is nearly three hours long and the camera remains uncomfortably tight on its participants, including Fielder, for most of that time.

You’ll also see Billy Evans’ penis, so be warned or titillated as you see fit.

As Fielder grows closer to Holmes and Evans, he puts them at ease enough to ask the tough questions: about Theranos, about the prison, and even about themselves. The resulting images are often shocking. You’ll see Elizabeth Holmes, who still maintains she’s done nothing wrong, answer “no” when Fielder asks her if she’s ever lied in her life. You’ll hear Billy Evans, the true villain of this particular story, tell everyone in the room that he carries a gun on him 24/7. You’ll see Fielder display the legendary “Who’s on first?” » sketch for Holmes and his partner, with Holmes completely missing the central joke of the sketch. You’ll see Fielder explain to Holmes that “Who” is the name of the guy at first base, and she still doesn’t really understand it. And you’ll see Holmes’ partner tell him, “You see the world differently,” in a chilling attempt to turn his apparent ignorance into something complimentary. The Silicon Valley mentality at work.

Speaking of Valley’s mindset, you’ll also see Holmes and Evans spend a lot of time in this movie trying to get Theranos 2.0 going. They even go so far as to remove some of the original Theranos blood testing devices, which look like a bunch of random TigerDirect parts they strung together, to show Fielder what their product can do. We don’t see him doing anything on screen, but the couple assures that he would if he was hooked up properly.

These scenes are extremely funny, but that’s not what Fielder is looking for. He tries to find out if this woman is a clueless naive, if she believes her own lies or if she is playing the role of character of an innocent woman, and so effectively that, to paraphrase Fielder, she might be the most manipulative person in the world.

The answer proves fabulously elusive, and so Fielder and Oppenheim go to extremes in their attempt to find it. They hold the camera on Holmes’ rubbery elf face for what seems like hours straight, to see if she will blink (figuratively). Or literally!). They interview Holmes’ visiting parents, with the father, former Enron executive Christian Holmes, casually telling Fielder that everything changed for his daughter “when she was raped.” At the extreme, they call on actress Amanda Seyfried – who plays Holmes in the Hulu TV show “The Dropout” – to recreate all the dialogue Fielder had with Holmes herself that couldn’t be recorded on camera. Seyfried is so convincing in impersonating Holmes that you, the audience, might forget in which scenes Seyfried was speaking to the camera and not to Holmes herself. I know I did it.

It gets crazier. After Holmes shows up in prison, Seyfried joins Fielder on a trip to visit Billy Evans in a clandestine attempt to get Holmes’ partner to admit that, unbeknownst to Holmes, he demanded (and was for a time promised) monetary compensation from studio A24 for the pair’s participation in this documentary.

A brief pause here. Billy Evans is the scion of the San Diego-based Evans Hotels family fortune. Evans met Holmes well after she became famous, but tells Fielder at the beginning of “You Can See Everything” that he didn’t recognize her when they first met. In fact, he fell in love with Holmes within an hour of meeting her, and then found out who she was. SO I still wanted to be with her anyway. Are you buying this story? Of course not. This man is incredibly full of bullshit, and it becomes even more evident when he is confronted by both Fielder and Seyfried after Holmes shows up at prison. That’s when we hear Evans sneer, “I’m better read than you” to Seyfried – who, as a reminder, is one of the most capable people in the world in her chosen profession. He also mocks Seyfried for being “possessed” on Twitter after she ridiculed the late white supremacist Charlie Kirk, whom Evans of course admired. This man is a real piece of shit.

Luckily, Seyfried says so, becoming an audience surrogate after this alarming sequence and telling Fielder that Holmes’ partner is “bats, not crazy.” Amanda Seyfried may be the coolest person in Hollywood. As for Fielder, he wonders if Holmes was victimized by his own partner, his former Theranos lover Sunny Balwani (also now in prison, and who Holmes also accused of raping her), and God knows who else. Was this woman, once a billionaire, more of a pawn than a mastermind? Fielder shows some (platonic) fondness for Holmes during this film, but at this point in the story it’s unclear whether hethe interviewer, also plays a character to get what he wants.

Fielder, to his credit, recognizes the thorny nature of it all. It is openly unsure whether Seyfried is dramatizing Holmes’ words on camera because, no matter how talented the actress is, it still isn’t Holmes herself saying those words on camera. He also doesn’t know if he has surreptitiously fallen for Holmes’ kindness, to the point where he wonders Seyfried believed Holmes when she told him, almost on a lark, that she had no idea Evans was making money behind his back. This leads Seyfried herself to question whether her own portrayal of Holmes in Hulu was the truth, an unclear truth, or simply fiction. By the end of the film, Seyfried isn’t even sure what the word “fiction” should mean.

This is what makes this film a masterpiece. “You can see everything” clearly refers to the many images that Fielder and Oppenheim were able to obtain. But here is a documentary that also shows you, the public, all of its methodology. It lets you see the potential flaws in his reporting and how those flaws might hinder the filmmakers’ attempt to find real answers.

It’s this truly radical transparency that sets this documentary apart not only from the spontaneous unwritten docs that now plague your television (Billy Evans cites Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s deal with Netflix as the reason he should be paid by A24 to appear on camera), but also from many of the best pure documentaries ever filmed. Here is a film that exists on the level of Banksy’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop” as an exceptional example of how the truth can be not only impossible to find but, with great determination, can be completely eradicated. I will never forget it.