You Can See Everything

Development

Directors Nathan Fielder (left) and Lance Oppenheim (right)

Oppenheim and Fielder first came into contact after Oppenheim learned Fielder had seen part of his 2020 documentary Some Kind of Heaven;^[9][10] Oppenheim, already a fan of Fielder's work, emailed him about it. The two became friends afterward and discussed the possibility of working together.^[11][10]

In 2023, Fielder invited Oppenheim to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, where someone called out Elizabeth Holmes' name in response to a magician's request for the name of a celebrity.^[10] Oppenheim remembered a rumor about Holmes asking A24 to document her life, and asked Fielder if he wanted to collaborate on such a project.^[12][11][13] According to Vanity Fair, Holmes was "[convinced] of her own innocence" after having been charged and sentenced for defrauding investors in 2022 and was "utterly certain that everyone else will believe her too, if only she has an opportunity to speak her truth".^[14] Fielder had read John Carreyrou's 2018 book Bad Blood and thought that the story had already been thoroughly covered in the media, but he became curious about Holmes's perspective following her retreat from the public eye.^[13]

Filming

In April 2023, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited the film crew to live at home with them and their children during the 34 days prior to Holmes beginning her prison sentence.^[13] Principal photography began at Holmes and Evans's rented beach house in Del Mar, California. A24 gave the filmmakers permission to pursue the project without a deadline or obligation to turn the footage into a finished film, with the studio saying that if nothing came of the project it could just be scrapped.^[13] According to Fielder, they knew they had a compelling story when crew members disagreed about what was happening in the house, saying: "And that's when we really realized, 'Oh, this is really interesting to follow this. We're all smart and we're really working at the top of our intelligence. Why can't we make sense of what's happening in this house?'"^[15]

The original plan was for Fielder to remain behind the camera, but the interactions Fielder had with Holmes and Evans were determined to be so strange that it was decided to include them in the film.^[16] According to Fielder, the filmmakers' relationship with Evans had deteriorated by the end of filming; Fielder recounted that "[n]ear the end of filming, Billy [Evans] was trying to exert a level of control over the project that made us uncomfortable, and communication with him sort of broke down because of that".^[14]

Fielder and Oppenheim also reached out to several people who knew Holmes or had worked with her, but were unable to get them to participate in the film. Fielder claimed "people did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her."^[15] Later, Fielder's friend Emma Stone introduced him to actress Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout.^[10] With Seyfried's permission, Fielder and Oppenheim filmed her reaction to the Del Mar footage.^[17] After Seyfried expressed an interest in portraying Holmes again, Fielder and Oppenheim decided to expand the project's scope by having Seyfried portray Holmes in reenactments of the filmmakers' private conversations with Holmes and Evans.^[10] Seyfried appears in the documentary both as herself and in her role as Holmes.^[18][19] Actor Christopher Abbott portrays Evans in the reenactments.^[20]

Music

Ari Balouzian, a frequent collaborator of Oppenheim's, composed the soundtrack for You Can See Everything. The soundtrack features 25 tracks which "help [to] build the film's uneasy atmosphere" and borrows from Bernard Hermann's score from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.^[19][21][22] It was released alongside the film on October 16, 2026.^[21]

Box office

In the United States and Canada, You Can See Everything was released alongside Whalefall, Street Fighter, and Sense and Sensibility, and was initially projected to gross $7–8 million from 855 theaters in its opening weekend.^[2] After making $5.5 million on its first day (including $1.8 million from Thursday night previews), weekend estimates were increased to $12–14 million. It went on to debut to $15.6 million, finishing second at the box office behind Street Fighter. It was the second-best ever opening weekend for a documentary behind Fahrenheit 9/11 ($23.9 million in 2004) and the biggest per-venue average ($17,300) for a film playing in under 1,000 theaters since Borat ($31,600 in 2006); there were reportedly more than 2,000 sold out showings over the weekend.^[27]

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 135 reviews, with an average rating of 9.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Nathan Fielder's ironclad commitment to the bit is pushed to its limit in You Can See Everything, an inscrutable Rorschach test of Elizabeth Holmes's psyche that's as absorbing as it is haunting."^[28] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 97 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[29] PostTrak audiences gave the film a 98% positive score, while 91% rating it a "definite recommend".^[27] The film's Telluride premiere drew positive early reviews, highlighting the filmmakers' close access to Holmes and Fielder's deadpan role as an on-camera interviewer.^[18][30]

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised the film, writing, "Few movies speak as uncannily to the pathos and destabilizing confusions of the present moment". Dargis further posited it to be the inverse of Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, suggesting that, in a way similar to how Welles exposed the "extent of [the] American lunatic fringe", You Can See Everything exposes "the legitimacy conferred on Holmes by her fame and the hundreds of millions of dollars that went into Theranos ... [s]erious people took her seriously".^[31]

Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman called the film "a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus" and said that it "overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness until it brings you into the enigmatic space where all those things meet".^[18] Richard Brody of The New Yorker noted how Fielder's role in You Can See Everything differed heavily from his past performances in programs such as Nathan for You, writing that "[n]othing Fielder discovers can top what's already widely known, so his observations inevitably temper [Holmes's] public image. Fielder's portrait of Holmes and his display of his methods turn his questioning to self-questioning, forcing him to assess, and even revise, basic assumptions about her and about life in general ... [f]or all the unpleasantness ... the film is more than fascinating and ingenious; it's strangely, poetically, poignantly beautiful".^[32]

Adrian Horton, from The Guardian, wrote that the film "was somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed", describing it as a "stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject."^[33] The Daily Beast's Nick Schager called You Can See Everything "not just the film of the year—it's a documentary that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the form's all-time greats."^[34] Alison Willmore of Vulture concurred in a review titled "Nathan Fielder Has Made the Movie of the Year", calling it "a surreal, agonizingly intimate window ... [into] how we decide whether we really know what's going on in the head and the heart of another person, where manipulation ends and investment begins".^[35]

Stephanie Zacharek, writing for Time, praised the second half, calling it "uncomfortably alluring." Zacharek, however, criticized the film for having a "stultifying smirkiness", and found its central theme of objectivity self-evident, writing that "You Can See Everything is designed to make us think, hard, about the relationship between a documentarian and his subject. But anyone who's never considered that relationship before probably hasn't been watching documentaries closely enough".^[36]

Response from involved parties

In an interview with David Friedberg on the All-In podcast shortly after the film's theatrical release, Evans said he hoped the film would allow viewers to "see who [Holmes] is" independently of media coverage. He also said that he had not seen the film, and acknowledged that participating in it may have been "the dumbest thing [he had] ever done".^[37][38] Fielder said in an October 2026 interview with Wired that Holmes had called him shortly before the film's theatrical release, expressing trust in him.^[39]

Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, whose investigative reporting helped expose Holmes's fraud, admired how the filmmakers provided "a microscope with which to observe and dissect [Holmes's] lies".^[40] In an op-ed for Stat, Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz praised the documentary's artistic merit but questioned Fielder's omissions. He noted that the device Holmes showed Fielder in the film was not the "unimpressive and rudimentary" one that led to Holmes's imprisonment, but rather an incomplete prototype of a future Theranos product; that she had been living at the $125 million Green Gables Estate during her trial; and that she had refused to show audited financial statements to investors.^[41] In an interview with CBS Mornings, Shultz said of the documentary: “They barely re-litigate Theranos at all, and when they do, they do so just enough to make sure there’s doubt in the audience’s mind about whether she was… telling the truth or not”. He also believed that the intention of the documentary from Holmes’ perspective was to gain sympathy, but noted how easy that is due to what he described as her “abusive relationship” with Evans, and commended Fielder for confronting her on the matter.^[42]

Accolades