'You Can See Everything': Why the Theranos Story Needed a Third Telling
Summary
- You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim for A24, follows Elizabeth Holmes in the 34 days before she went to prison, and stayed secret for about three years until a surprise Telluride screening.
- It opened to an estimated $15 million from 855 theaters, the biggest documentary opening since 2013, with a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score and more than 2,000 sold-out screenings.
- Where Bad Blood and The Dropout asked what Holmes did, this film asks what it means to watch someone and still not know. Noozify gives it an A−.
Here is a puzzle worth sitting with. By 2026, Elizabeth Holmes may be the most exhaustively documented fraudster of her generation, the subject of a newspaper exposé, a bestselling book, a podcast, a prestige miniseries, and a criminal trial that ran for months. So why would anyone line up to watch a nearly three-hour film about her, and why would enough people do so that it became a box office story in its own right?
The established canon deserves a quick tour first. John Carreyrou, the reporter who broke the Theranos story wide open at The Wall Street Journal, expanded his reporting into the 2018 book Bad Blood, a procedural of deception built from whistleblowers, documents, and legal threats. Hulu's The Dropout later dramatized the saga as scripted television, giving the rise and collapse a human face and a period soundtrack. Both works share a vantage point: they look at Holmes from the outside, assembling a verdict from the evidence after the fact.
The setup of You Can See Everything declines that vantage point entirely. According to the official logline, thirty-four days before she is sent to prison, Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. The invitation, as Time reports, came at the urging of her partner, Billy Evans, who had approached the studio A24 about making a film about the couple. The project then stayed secret for roughly three years, until it surfaced as a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival.
The directorial pairing is itself a small curiosity. Nathan Fielder, making his feature debut, built his reputation on the deadpan docu-comedies Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, in which sincerity and absurdity become nearly indistinguishable. Lance Oppenheim, meanwhile, has spent his career on patient, observational portraits of unusual communities, from the retirees of Some Kind of Heaven to the semen donors of Spermworld. Fielder appears on camera as the interlocutor, while Oppenheim works largely behind the scenes.
Fielder, according to one account of the Telluride premiere, had read Bad Blood and initially saw little reason to make another documentary about Holmes. A24 reportedly gave the pair unusual latitude, with no deadline and no obligation to ever release anything. Even the director seems to find his own presence on screen an open question; as he told the Telluride crowd, "I don't know why I'm there."
What distinguishes this film from its predecessors is a shift in the central question. Bad Blood and The Dropout ask what happened and who knew what, and they answer with chronology. This film places the viewer in the room with its subject, who, as NPR notes, insists she has never lied, and turns the inquiry toward a more slippery problem: how anyone can know what a person believes about herself.
The access is the other contribution, and it carries a certain irony. By one summary of Carreyrou's own reaction, Holmes granted these filmmakers the access she had refused the reporter who exposed her. Variety observes that the film never mounts an apologia for her, yet it offers something no courtroom transcript can, which is texture, the daily rhythm and strange domestic calm of a person on the brink. I will stop there on purpose, because reviewers who saw it at Telluride agree that the film starts as one thing before becoming another, and the pleasure lies in discovering how.
Critically, the reception has been close to unanimous, and unusually so. The film holds a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score and a Letterboxd rating of 4.7 out of 5 at the time of writing, and Vulture's Alison Willmore went so far as to name it the movie of the year, according to its Wikipedia summary of the reviews. Fielder himself sounds a bit bewildered, telling the Telluride audience, "I'm struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced."
The dissent is worth hearing, too. Time cautions that your feelings about the film will depend on how much of its director you can take, and NPR's critic argues that the film sets aside some evidence that would shed light on its subject. Next Best Picture, otherwise admiring, finds blind spots around the real victims of Theranos. The most interesting verdict comes from Carreyrou, who has seen the film twice and called it "a great work of art" while urging viewers not to mistake it for a factual account, and who pointed again to the pressure Holmes's circle placed on whistleblowers Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung.
The money is where the story turns almost as odd as the film. The movie earned an estimated $15 million from just 855 locations, a per-theater average of $17,543, finishing second behind Paramount's Street Fighter. Per CNN, A24 described it as "one of the largest limited-release openings of the 21st century." It is the biggest documentary opening since 2013's One Direction: This Is Us if concert films count, and the biggest since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 if they do not.
Consider, too, how little the film had going for it by conventional measures. It reportedly cost under $7 million to make and less than $10 million to market, and it carried no franchise and no famous cast, plus a runtime that would make most exhibitors wince. Yet audiences, more than 70 percent of them under 35, gave it a 91 percent "definite recommend" in exit polling, and A24 reported more than 2,000 sellout screenings. TheWrap credits Fielder's fandom, a sense of mystique, and a fear of spoilers for the turnout, and Oscar speculation has followed.
So why a third telling? Because the first two answered the question of what Holmes did, and this one, almost perversely, asks what it means to watch someone and still not know. That may be exactly what a young, screen-saturated audience wants from a story about a woman who curated a self so carefully that an entire industry mistook it for a product. Carreyrou's caveat is the sensible frame: read the book for the facts, see the film for the unease, and resist the temptation to let the second stand in for the first.
Noozify's overall grade for You Can See Everything is an A−, the average of four report-card grades on an A-to-F scale.
| Subject | Grade | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Acting | A− | Holmes's guarded on-camera presence and Fielder's deadpan, uneasy interlocutor supply most of the film's tension, though a performance this self-aware is inherently hard to grade. |
| Directing | A | Fielder and Oppenheim sustain nearly three hours of observational patience and keep the tone off balance without tipping into mockery or apologia. |
| Writing | A− | Structure does the work a script usually would, withholding and revealing at well-judged intervals, with the main deduction coming from critics' complaints about blind spots around the real victims. |
| Production | B+ | Intimate, handsomely assembled, and made for under $7 million, though the stripped-down look is deliberate rather than dazzling. Ari Balouzian's dissonant score of piano and strings is integral in heightening the anxiety as the film progresses. |
| Overall | A− | Averaged on a four-point scale, the four grades come to 3.7, which rounds to an A−. |