Elizabeth Holmes was once the face of Silicon Valley’s obsession with disruption. As the founder of Theranos, the blood-testing start-up she launched in 2003, Holmes claimed her company had developed technology capable of performing a huge range of medical tests using only a tiny amount of blood. Investors believed her. So did much of the business world.
Then it all unravelled.
Investigations revealed that Theranos’s technology did not work as Holmes had claimed, triggering the company’s collapse and a criminal prosecution. In 2022, Holmes was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors and was later sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison. She reported to prison in May 2023.
Her extraordinary rise and spectacular fall have already been turned into documentaries, podcasts and the acclaimed Hulu drama The Dropout. So why does A24’s new film, You Can See Everything, feel so unsettling?
The answer is Nathan Fielder.
The filmmaker behind Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has spent three years secretly making a documentary about Holmes with director Lance Oppenheim. The film begins 34 days before Holmes is due to enter prison, after she invites the filmmakers to document her life. What follows, according to A24, becomes a “mind-bending” journey that goes far beyond a conventional portrait of a disgraced entrepreneur.
That strangeness is already apparent in the teaser. Holmes sits opposite Fielder, staring directly at him while insisting that she has nothing to deceive him about. The scene is almost painfully intimate. There is no dramatic reconstruction or actor playing Holmes. It is Holmes herself, attempting to control the narrative of her own story.
And that is what makes the footage so jarring.
We know what happened to Theranos. We know Holmes was convicted of fraud. Yet Fielder places himself directly inside her world and appears to ask the question that has followed Holmes for years: is she manipulating everyone around her, or is she herself being manipulated?
The film reportedly becomes even stranger after Holmes enters prison, incorporating reenactments and unexpected twists that deliberately blur the boundary between documentary and performance.
In other words, You Can See Everything is not simply another Elizabeth Holmes exposé. It appears to be a film about watching Elizabeth Holmes, and about how impossible it may be to know exactly what we are watching.