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The reviews are in for Nathan Fielder’s highly-anticipated documentary about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes ahead of its US premiere – and critics are calling it “the film of the year”.
Directed by Fielder and Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything sees Holmes invite the filmmakers into her home just days before being sent to prison, with filming taking place in secret over three years.
Holmes, 42, was convicted of fraud in 2022 after claiming that her startup, Theranos, had developed a revolutionary medical device that could diagnose a range of conditions with just a few droplets of blood extracted from the tip of a finger. After being found to have duped investors with technology that never worked, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison and started her time at a Texas facility in May 2023.
The film is set to land in US theatres on 16 October and in the UK on 20 November, with its first reviews giving the film a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes of 100 per cent. On review site Metacritic, the movie has received a similarly high score of 97 and been given the label “universal acclaim”.
Elizabeth Holmes with one of her children and Nathan Fielder in ‘You Can See Everything’ (A24)
“Not just the film of the year – it’s a documentary that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the form’s all-time greats,” The Daily Beast wrote in its review, while The Guardian called it a “modern masterpiece of deceit”.
“The hype is deserved,” the publication continued, adding that it is “somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed – a stupefying and glorious destabilising hall of psychological mirrors”.
Others warned that viewers will leave the conceptually ambitious film with “no idea what you have just seen”.
“You Can See Everything is just about the further thing from a ‘pure’ documentary,” Variety wrote. “It’s a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus.”
Screen Daily praised the documentary for demonstrating “the fallacy of reality in art while acknowledging that everyone – including the filmmakers and Holmes and [her partner Billy] Evans – distorts the truth for their own purposes”.
The reviews won’t come as a huge surprise for fans of Fielder, the deadpan comedian who is best known for creating absurdist projects, which are undercut with a sense of unease throughout. His HBO docu-comedy The Rehearsal, for example, blurred the line between reality and fiction.
‘You Can See Everything’ directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (Getty)
He also created and starred in the satirical reality show Nathan for You, playing a fictionalised version of himself while trying to help small businesses by suggesting outlandish strategies.
In September, You Can See Everything released a new trailer for the film, in which an unblinking Holmes told Fielder: “I don’t have anything to deceive you on. Of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.”
The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival that month, with attendees being required to lock their phones in pouches during the screening.
You Can See Everything is released in the US later this week.