{"id":808174,"date":"2026-10-20T02:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T02:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/808174\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T02:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T02:46:11","slug":"secrets-lies-and-a-shock-a-list-cameo-how-you-can-see-everything-became-the-film-of-the-year-you-can-see-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/808174\/","title":{"rendered":"Secrets, lies and a shock A-list cameo: how You Can See Everything became the film of the year | You Can See Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything<\/a>, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy. In tight zoom, saturation turned up \u2013 Fielder\u2019s arched brows and Holmes\u2019s oceanic blue eyes as stark as two magnetic poles \u2013 he asks her: \u201cAre you being real right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

That question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie, particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film\u2019s existence was announced in September. That first half \u2013 essentially, the only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and\/or the theatrical experience could talk about \u2013 takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud. We watch as Fielder, over a few surreal weeks in a beachfront rental, attempts to puncture Holmes\u2019s indomitable facade of faultlessness. It\u2019s not exactly comedic, this chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV\u2019s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot\u2019s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side. This section resembles, in feel, the pull of an internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves. Was Holmes \u201cbeing real\u201d, for instance, when she told Fielder, with seemingly complete sincerity, that she has never told a lie in her life? Or when she continued to insist, despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s at once astounding how many people took her seriously, given how obviously mendacious she and her husband appear, and also understandable: the more time you spend with her \u2013 the more time you spend watching Fielder spend time with her \u2013 the more magnetic the force of her delusions. Or is it manipulations? Or both? There is no one correct read on what, exactly, she\u2019s thinking. \u201cI know what you\u2019re feeling,\u201d an obviously irritated Evans tells Fielder after he bristles at Holmes\u2019s indistinction between the meanings of can perform and could theoretically perform 1,000 diagnostic tests. It is a relief, and one of the best lines of an extremely rich text, when the comedian immediately shoots back with his own irritation: \u201cNo, you don\u2019t.\u201d The fundamental unknowability of another person, even a known liar, is fascinating, but also its own dead end.<\/p>\n

If the first half had been released as a standalone film, it would probably have generated some attention and then faded as an artefact of a particular era of Silicon Valley celebrity, a briefly fascinating but inconclusive stunt. But luckily for us \u2013 and the theatrical box office, where You Can See Everything had the most successful opening weekend for a documentary in over 20 years<\/a> \u2013 Fielder and Oppenheim kept filming. You Can See Everything is, essentially, two films in one: an elevated true crime documentary, and then an experiment unraveling the preconceptions of a documentary. It\u2019s the back half of this immense movie, which picks up in 2025, after Holmes has spent some time in prison, makes You Can See Everything the film of the year \u2013 a formally ambitious feat that not only pushes the boundaries of nonfiction cinema but speaks to our destabilizing present of endless, inescapable manipulation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason You Can See Everything currently holds a rare close-to-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>, is among the highest-rated films all time<\/a> on Letterboxd and has solid odds to become the first doc to ever be nominated for a best picture Oscar. In the second half of the movie \u2013 stop now if you haven\u2019t seen \u2013 Fielder recruits a shockingly game (and possibly awards-worthy<\/a>) Amanda Seyfried, star of The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series on the Theranos debacle. At first, it seems as though Seyfried is participating in her own stunt: how funny and improbable, to see the actor who won an Emmy for playing Elizabeth Holmes watch footage of Holmes watching Seyfried play Holmes. Two very famous people, confronted by famous representations of themselves. Whose reaction is genuine?<\/p>\n

But Seyfried thrillingly becomes part of the very Fielderian pursuit of emotional truth through arcane artifice. Borrowing logic from his groundbreaking HBO series The Rehearsal<\/a>, Fielder inserts Seyfried into an escalating series of re-enactments, trying to wring some clarity out of his real interactions with Holmes, then out of their own reactions to the simulations. Seyfried oscillates between a conviction that The Dropout was a work of fiction grounded in fact, and that its liberties may have violated another person. Never have I seen an actor really dig into what it means to play a real person like Seyfried here, grappling with her various responsibilities \u2013 to Holmes the person, to Holmes the character, to story, to facts, to herself \u2013 in real time, shifting with each new piece of info or tilt of perspective.<\/p>\n

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Photograph: Todd Williamson\/JanuaryImages for A24\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

The Dropout, for what it\u2019s worth, was the best of a series of scam shows<\/a> from 2022 that tried to turn the rise and fall of inflated 2010s tech companies such as Uber or WeWork into entertainment. (One of the film\u2019s best punchlines is simply observing that Evans, with his \u201cLASERS\u201d license plate and obsession with a new Theranos \u201cdevice\u201d, continues to push Theranos 2.0 \u2026 at a WeWork). You Can See Everything coincidentally arrives amid a new wave of Hollywood attempts to make sense of tech world, from Aaron Sorkin\u2019s dreadful The Social Reckoning to Luca Guadagnino\u2019s OpenAI film Artificial to Alex Gibney\u2019s colossal doc Musk, that feel insufficient to the magnitude and lunacy of the moment. By being neither bound to representation nor straightforward journalism, You Can See Everything gets to what we might call the \u201cemotional truth\u201d of this era \u2013 and not just because Evans, a professed Charlie Kirk fan seemingly radicalized by his Musk-owned X timeline who commissioned an AI hologram of his wife, emerges as a very 2020s villain, a tech bro with a possible drug problem and a god complex. Layer by layer, Fielder and co deconstruct the underpinnings of their storytelling, from Evans\u2019s original deal to profit from the film to his possible loyalty toward a woman he has evident chemistry with. Truth, in fact, is dependent on what you\u2019re shown.<\/p>\n

This is the pinnacle of Fielder\u2019s longstanding effort to invert assumptions of \u201creality\u201d on screen. A former producer on Canadian Idol, he\u2019s a student of reality television, a misnomer we readily accept: of course, we know, there is no true reality on TV. But documentary tends to court the benefit of the doubt, as if their presentation did not reflect the makers\u2019 own biases and motivations. The joke is in the title; You Can See Everything<\/a> is itself a lie \u2013 we cannot. Choices are made, things are not shown. Omniscience is impossible.<\/p>\n

But we are, in this advent of AI, training to scan everything as manipulated. \u201cAre you being real right now?\u201d applies as much to celebrity bodies as to meme-motivated foreign wars as to the Instagram dog videos sent by my mom as to what, exactly, is going on with Elizabeth Holmes<\/a>. We\u2019re in uncharted waters now, the type best navigated collectively \u2013 such as with a theater full of other people, attempting briefly to make sense of the nonsensical, working with material delivered by the biases and motivations of other people, all vying for our attention. At what point, in this hall of mirrors, do you trust? I emerged from You Can See Everything unnerved: you maybe never know, but you still have to try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":808175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-808174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}