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Review: You Can See Everything blurs the view of Elizabeth Holmes' deceit
Elizabeth Holmes has some people falling for her act all over again.
In 2015, biomedical entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was Silicon Valley’s golden girl, lauded as the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire thanks to the company she founded, Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion at the height of its success. Then it all came crashing down when accusations of fraud surfaced about the company’s signature blood-testing device, culminating in a sensational trial. Holmes was convicted on four counts and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Holmes is back in the headlines thanks to a new film, You Can See Everything, which depicts the final days before Holmes, having exhausted her appeals, went to prison. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it’s a surreal, absurdist piece that has largely been received with gushing enthusiasm and no small amount of hype, with some declaring it the best film of the year. A few contrarian voices have emerged over the past week with much-needed reality checks, but there’s no denying the film is destined to be an awards-season darling.
Pardon me for joining the buzzkills, but I cannot in good conscience jump on the You Can See Everything bandwagon. Sure, it has its moments, and the second half is highly entertaining, but there’s nothing here to warrant all the breathless hyperbole. For all their much-touted access, Oppenheim and Fielder have produced a surprisingly shallow film that runs in circles, yielding very little fresh or novel insight—into Holmes, personally, or much else.
I get that manufacturing ambiguity is the much-ballyhooed point. I get that much of the film’s appeal lies in how much fun people have afterward vigorously debating their interpretations of key scenes. But there’s no real mystery here. Holmes is still spouting all the same talking points and self-justifications, still playing the victim, dodging accountability, and affixing blame on anyone except herself, just as she did all the way through her trial. The only mystery is why a convicted fraudster is still deemed worthy of our attention.
tl;dr: Elizabeth Holmes is back on her bulls—t, and some people are falling for the act all over again.
(Spoilers below the first gallery. We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)
There is already an excellent HBO documentary about Holmes and Theranos by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, a companion piece to journalist John Carreyrou’s 2018 book, Bad Blood. (I reviewed Gibney’s latest, Musk, earlier this month.) Holmes was also the focus of the 2022 Hulu fictionalized miniseries (and associated podcast) The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. None showed Holmes how she clearly wished to be perceived, so she reached out to A24 about making a documentary to tell her side of the story.
You will be shocked to hear that Holmes believes she is innocent and thought all she needed to do was “speak her truth” in order to convince everyone else, too. It didn’t work on a jury of her peers—who deemed her the least credible witness of the entire trial—but apparently it worked on Fielder. At least he’s in good company: Holmes fooled a lot of smart, savvy people for years before a pair of whistleblowers (Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung) exposed her lies.
Fielder, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a comedian, best known for his Comedy Central series (currently streaming on HBO) Nathan for You. Fielder played a fictionalized version of himself as a recent business graduate who “consulted” for struggling local businesses in LA. The gimmick: Fielder’s advice, offered in his trademark deadpan style, was deliberately weird, such as suggesting an ice cream store offer a poop flavor to generate headlines and draw customers. In another episode, he faked a video, which actually went viral, of a pig rescuing a goat at the local petting zoo.