You Can See Everything, Except the Truth About Elizabeth Holmes: A Review
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You Can See Everything, the nearly 3-hour documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Elizabeth Holmes during the 34 days leading up to her incarceration in 2023. The film offers intimate access to the disgraced Theranos founder, her partner Billy Evans and their children as she attempts to recast herself before the cameras.
The story of Holmes, who was convicted of fraud in 2018 and sentenced to over a decade in federal prison, and her startup-turned-dumpster fire, has become Silicon Valley legend. A Stanford dropout, Holmes started Theranos at age 19 in 2003, claiming it could diagnose a variety of maladies with “a few drops of blood.” She was soon celebrated as the world’s youngest “self-made woman billionaire,” though we know that no billionaire is truly self-made.
Holmes’ claims fell apart in 2015, thanks to reporter John Carreyrou’s landmark exposé, the testimonies of various whistleblowers and government investigations. Holmes and Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were convicted of defrauding investors and ordered to pay $452 million in restitution.
After months of reading online hype and buzz, CNET writers and editors saw You Can See Everything this week. Like amateur psychoanalysts, we spent hours debating what we actually saw. Then, we decided we couldn’t write just one movie review. So we compiled our opinions, questions and revelations into this mega-review. Beware: Major spoilers lie ahead.
The Damsel, the Grift and the Silicon Valley Script
By Laura Michelle Davis, senior editor
Rather than a tech documentary, You Can See Everything feels like a psychological thriller with comic undertones. But the Theranos scandal is, at its core, a portrait of how tech-industry “visionaries” operate. At the startup’s height, Elizabeth Holmes presented her corporate ambition and high-risk profit-seeking as part of a moral mission to change the world. That “do-gooder” framing has always been, in Silicon Valley, a license for deceit — and it usually carries legitimate human consequences.
Holmes was constrained by a world that relegates women, both in STEM and beyond, to secondary status. She was shaped by the belief that all women must perform to be believed. She was, at the same time, as skilled a grifter as any, trained to “fake it till you make it.” Her gender is what made her so captivating and what subjected her to a level of scrutiny that powerful men rarely face. As the journalist Liz Plank wrote: “There is something distinctly American about watching a woman go to prison for the kind of behavior that could get a man elected president.”
In the public imagination, Holmes has often been reduced to a binary: sociopathic liar or innocent scapegoat. You Can See Everything complicates that binary by asking whether she might also be a victim of misogynist masters, or at least a victim of her own self-delusion.
There is no question that Holmes operated in — and was shaped by — a male-dominated tech world. Her professional and romantic relationships were marked by abuse and control (her current partner, Billy Evans, has power of attorney over her life). But in the film, she spends so much time presenting herself as fragile, misunderstood and trapped that we risk forgetting the other Elizabeth Holmes: the liar, schemer and tyrannical overseer of Theranos.
Although the film gives little weight to her past machinery of deception, remember that Holmes raised $700 million through false financial statements, false pharmaceutical reports, false product demonstrations and false revenue claims. To reach her peak celebrity status, with an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion, she had to convince investors and the public that she knew exactly what she was doing.
Then, in the film, post-fall, as a mother facing prison, she had to appear like a naive damsel in distress, another manipulative performance within the same business model. Despite her misty-eyed, trad-wife persona, Holmes remains a female shill for Silicon Valley founder mythology: the belief that vision, charisma and relentless self-belief entitle one to bypass ordinary rules. A founder, just without a foundation.
You Can See Everything relies on a deliberately disorienting structure, blending reality, performance and unreliable narration. But art should not obscure facts. Like many leading executives in the AI race, Holmes used grandiose, data-verbose, futuristic promises to evade scrutiny. She’s still aiming for returns, either via public sympathy or government pardon. If today’s Silicon Valley male founders can sell unproven futures as monumental breakthroughs, then Theranos 2.0 is already under construction.
Will the real Elizabeth Holmes please stand up?
By Katelyn Chedraoui, reporter
To what I imagine is Elizabeth Holmes’ dismay, the best part of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary is Amanda Seyfried.
Seyfried played Holmes, or a version of her, in Hulu’s 2022 series The Dropout. Unsurprisingly, the real Holmes isn’t a fan of her fictional portrayal and portrayer. But after Fielder’s 34 days with Holmes are up, he pivots the entire documentary, and there is Seyfried. The real Seyfried, watching the real Elizabeth Holmes watching Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. Meta is an understatement.
Fielder reaches out to Seyfried as a quasi-expert on Holmes, though Seyfried is insistent that the character she played in The Dropout is fictional, even if it was well-researched. But after we spend the first half of the film in Holmes’ fantasyland — Holmes and Evans are in such complete denial about the harm Theranos caused that you’d be forgiven for yelling at the screen — we need to see Seyfried. She’s the ultimate, visual reality check: Holmes is such an infamous liar and so disgraced in modern society that Hollywood literally made a show about it.
Or maybe not. Fielder and Seyfried try to make sense of the many layers and lies. There’s no clear answer. Seyfried’s vacillation between empathizing with Holmes and questioning her motives is exactly what I did the entire movie. At times, I found myself with an unexpected sympathy for Holmes, this mother of two, asking what an invasive strip search entails, who says she wants to use this documentary to reclaim her narrative. And then we learn information that forces us to question whether the entire deal is another con.
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s 2022 series The Dropout.
Hulu
In Fielder’s signature absurdist style, Seyfried actually steps back into the role of Holmes, re-creating Fielder’s memories of conversations he had with Holmes when the cameras weren’t allowed to record — their first meeting, a prison phone call and an in-person prison visit. Seyfried sinks back into the role, frizzy hair, voice modulation and all, with scary ease. There were moments when I forgot Seyfried wasn’t the real Elizabeth Holmes.
Maybe that’s the whole point. We will never know with absolute certainty how much control Holmes has over her own image, voice, narrative. Seyfried had a lot of power in shaping how the public views Holmes, same as Evans, who is in complete control of his partner’s social media account (we discover this at what had to be the world’s worst dinner party). Is Holmes shaping her own legacy more than it’s being shaped for her by others? And ultimately, is she truly so divorced from reality that she believes she didn’t lie?
In the final scenes of Hulu’s The Dropout, a Theranos lawyer starts yelling at Seyfried, “You hurt people.” It’s a powerful moment when an undeniable truth that has been echoed in every public chamber finally breaks through to Theranos’ inner circle.
Seyfried sticks in her AirPods and runs away. All these years later, Holmes is still running away.
Don’t expect a journalistic investigation, but it’s a fascinating ride
By Gael Cooper, editor
There were times while I was watching You Can See Everything that I wanted to jump through the screen and shake the former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the director Nathan Fielder. “Ask her the right question!” I wanted to yell. “Tell the truth!”
The film is fascinating and thought-provoking, but it isn’t exactly satisfying. Holmes tells Fielder she never lied, ever, in her life. He’s suspicious, but we don’t see him question even one of the many lies she told in her Theranos days. Did she not say that the military was actively using Theranos devices in war zones? Or claim blood test results from competing machines came from her device?
During the film, Holmes drags out an alleged Theranos blood-testing device (Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says this isn’t the infamous Edison machine that got the company in trouble, but a planned future version). Holmes and Fielder get into a Bill Clinton-esque definition fight over the meaning of “can,” with Holmes insisting the device “can” run any test – if only they had developed the chemistries to do so.
Sure, Jan. And my 2017 Honda Accord “can” win a Formula 1 race, if only I had developed a magical motor.
At one point, Fielder shows Holmes the famous Abbott and Costello Who’s on First? comedy routine. To him, it’s a way to demonstrate that perhaps she is simply incapable of cluing in to things that other people figure out instantly. No wonder the words “can” and “lie” don’t mean the same to her as to us. She’s not living in our language’s universe. And if you buy that, I have a couple of hundred blood-testing machines to sell you.
There are other frustrating moments in the film if you’re looking for a serious investigation. Holmes’ father seems ready to talk about what he thinks brought his daughter to this point, days from a prison sentence, even making one shocking and sad revelation. But when he’s about to make the reveal, Holmes’ awful partner, Billy Evans, interrupts the conversation, and we never hear what Dad was going to say.
The first sound we hear in the film is one of Holmes’ children, gurgling. The kids are innocents, and while I’m glad they’re not over-featured, I wanted to hear at least something about her decision to bring two babies into the world, knowing she’d likely be behind bars for their first decade of life. That question, too, goes unasked and unanswered.
Don’t get me wrong. The film is absorbing, every scene sparking endless discussion with others who’ve seen it. It could become the first documentary to win a Best Picture Oscar. But if you plop into your theater seat thinking this will be a nonfiction documentary along the lines of The Act of Killing, rethink your assumptions. If you want a straightforward explanation of Holmes’ crimes, read John Carreyrou’s acclaimed 2018 nonfiction book Bad Blood. Instead, Fielder is taking us on a roller-coaster ride through “Holmes World,” and we’ve never been to a place quite like it.
It’s not just a documentary; it’s a horror film
By Aaron Pruner, writer
I’ve been waiting for Nathan Fielder to make a horror film. And while I wouldn’t necessarily categorize You Can See Everything as scary, the film exudes a mumblecore-style and claustrophobic energy that made me think, more than once, of one of the standout genre releases of the year: Kane Parsons’s liminal blockbuster hit, Backrooms.
I’ve seen every episode of Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan for You; his absurdist HBO Max series The Rehearsal; and the horror-adjacent Paramount Plus series The Curse. I had a feeling this new joint would tick another disturbing narrative box for someone who’s made a career out of making people laugh and squirm in their seats.
The first thing that stood out was the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio. Like most things Fielder does, this odd choice had a purpose, and before long, I felt the claustrophobia of the “Is Elizabeth Holmes guilty or innocent?” narrative close in around me, much like in Backrooms’ yellow hallway maze.
Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim draw the audience in with a collection of close-up shots and slow pans that heighten the tension and drama of simple conversations. Holmes invited Fielder in, offered him a bed to sleep on and unfettered access to her life. But is it unfettered? Is she being honest? Is Fielder getting a manipulative taste of his own medicine by Holmes, or is he manipulating us once again?
In every scene, Fielder wrestles with the notion that Holmes may be telling the truth, or potentially be on the spectrum, with an inability to read certain social cues or understand language differences between “can” and “capable.” Is that it? How can she be lying to him during their intimate conversations on the couch while she calmly rocks her baby to sleep with her foot?
But the point of You Can See Everything isn’t to answer the question of Holmes’ innocence or guilt. Instead, it’s another exercise by Fielder, putting a mirror up to society and honing in on people’s quick knack for believing one narrative over another.
He peels away the layers of the story, first through his interactions with Holmes, then with her partner Billy Evans and finally with Amanda Seyfried, all while trying to decode the different perspectives.
You Can See Everything is an unsettling vibe, unlike any documentary I’ve ever seen.
I lost count of the times I found myself questioning how Fielder and Oppenheim got any number of shots in the film. At times, it feels like a simple cinéma vérité, fly-on-the-wall-style production. At other times, the production quality and intimate nature of the sequences paint an organic story through assertive camera work informed by stylized accuracy.
Closed-in, melodic, off-kilter, eerie, heartbreaking… these are just some ways to describe the documentary, largely thanks to the atmospheric elements composer Ari Balouzian brought to the project. Sometimes, a movie is best when it changes you on an emotional level.
You Can See Everything will live rent-free in my head for a while. Much like Backrooms, I left the theater feeling transformed, as if I were coming out of a hypnotic, cinematic trance. Well played, Mr. Fielder. Well played.
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