This review contains spoilers for the film You Can See Everything.
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I saw You Can See Everything
— the new documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim — on Thursday, and I still feel like my brain is trying to punch its way out of a bag, or like I’ve just awakened from an Inception-esque dream within a dream. It’s difficult to describe the winding, twisting, nearly three-hour film to someone unfamiliar with its many layers of context, from Fielder’s Dadaist, boundaryless approach to his subjects to Holmes’s hypnotic affect, which is either highly effective gaslighting or blinding, self-deluded earnestness. (Which is it? I still don’t know.)
What happens when you take two unreliable narrators — make that three, if you include Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, whose on-camera persona morphs from protective, naive tech bro to unscrupulous grifter — put them in a jar, and shake them? The result is that the more questions are asked, the further the truth drifts out of reach. It’s like staring at a Magic Eye image, slightly crossing your eyes, desperate to make out the hidden 3D subject but never quite managing to see it. Eventually, you start worrying your eyes might get stuck that way.
The discourse surrounding the film is already abundant, but we’re here to talk about the eggs.
If you’re familiar with the hallmarks of Fielderian programming, you know that Fielder is prone to hyperfixating on seemingly mundane details that later return to completely upend viewers’ expectations. In You Can See Everything, one such detail is observed in an exchange between Holmes and Evans as they make eggs. How much can be gleaned from watching someone make breakfast? A lot, apparently.
In the first half of the film, Fielder is fully embedded in the rental home of Holmes and Evans, who have invited the filmmakers to document the final weeks before Holmes reports to federal prison. (How and why they agreed to this arrangement is incomprehensible if they knew anything about Fielder’s work.) During this time, the narrative takes a surprisingly sympathetic turn for Holmes, who seems intent on convincing the filmmakers — and Fielder specifically — that she is actually a sweet, misunderstood victim of circumstance, not a Machiavellian con woman who defrauded investors. Frankly, aspects of this claim feel convincing at times. Viewers are invited to witness her ostensibly less guarded moments, including a scene in which she makes breakfast with Evans. As Fielder interviews her, Holmes somewhat unenthusiastically and limply beats a bowl of eggs with a fork. The camera lingers on her feeble whisking technique. Then, after a few seconds, another set of hands enters the frame: those of Evans. Without a word, he takes the bowl and fork from Holmes and begins whipping the eggs with considerably greater fervor.
Now, backseat driving in the kitchen is hardly uncommon among couples, though it feels like a fast track to bickering. (Evans tells Fielder that he and Holmes “never fight”; Holmes is also emphatic that she’s never lied in her life. Again, unreliable narrators.) What’s less common — or at least generally considered pretty rude and aggressive — is grabbing something out of your partner’s hands mid-task to take over. Fielder points this out, asking Evans why he felt the need to grab the eggs; Holmes explains that Evans doesn’t like the way she mixes them and thinks he can do it better.
It’s a tiny interaction, but a remarkably revealing one. Evans feels comfortable taking control of something Holmes is doing, without so much as asking, and seems largely unaware of how his behavior might come across on camera. Holmes, meanwhile, appears accustomed to the intrusion, offering an explanation rather than an objection. (Granted, unlike sustained and unblinking eye contact, beating eggs does not appear to be one of Ms. Holmes’s strong suits. Typically, one does so vigorously to aerate them and make them fluffier for an omelet or scramble.)
But with this being Elizabeth Holmes, we must also ask: Could it be a case of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, not wanting the task of beating the eggs, she intentionally does so insufficiently to make Evans take over? Is she being controlled, or is she getting someone else to do her work for her? Or is this evidence of her “different” way of thinking, that she truly doesn’t know the “right” way to beat them?
In interviews in the film, Holmes portrays the Theranos years as a period during which she was manipulated by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani, and maintains that her intentions were ultimately good for humanity, regardless of the consequences for investors and patients who received unreliable test results. Whether she actually believes this account of events, or simply knows how to sell it, remains one of the film’s central mysteries — as does the extent to which her romantic relationships lead her to take the fall for the actions of bad worse men.
These questions reverberate in the second half of the film, when — with Holmes now in prison — we learn some unsettling things about Evans. He has power of attorney over Holmes, and has been using her X account to post odd, profanity-laced remarks that seem entirely incongruent with her own manner of speaking. Suddenly, the eggs scene looks like an early indication that Evans is far more domineering than the protective-partner persona he’s been presenting. His ostensible vigilance toward Holmes may be genuine on some level, but it’s difficult to reconcile with his willingness to license her image for billboards promoting another (bizarre-seeming) entrepreneur’s Theranos obsession, or his apparent acceptance of the possibility that her AI-generated likeness could be used to create pornography or other content antithetical to her interests.
And yet, even as Evans emerges as an increasingly unsavory character, Holmes remains inscrutable. Does she know what he’s doing? Does she approve? Is he exploiting her circumstances, or are they working toward a shared objective — reputational, monetary, or otherwise? The film offers kaleidoscopic evidence for competing interpretations, including that even if Holmes is being dominated, she may be content with that dynamic.
What’s extraordinary about Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary is its optical-illusion-like layers of “truth.” Despite the film’s many harrowing close-ups of microexpressions, there is what Holmes and Evans say, then there is what they do, or have done, or plan to do (launch a Theranos 2.0 called Haemanthus, apparently). There is also Fielder’s own history as a provocateur, a faux-earnest magician who will go to virtually any lengths to actualize a concept, and who seems remarkably capable of keeping a stone-cold straight face through any scenario.
We know enough about Fielder to question his sincerity, too. There are several moments in the film where I — and the several friends I went to see the film with — wondered if there was palpable sexual chemistry between him and Holmes, and whether Fielder would act on it. If he did, we couldn’t agree on whether it would be genuine or an act of performance art, or whether he has any barriers between those things.
The film’s most revealing moments are the ones that feel off-script for everyone involved: a fleeting facial expression, an odd word choice in an otherwise emphatic statement, a series of gestures exchanged over a bowl of scrambled eggs. The subjects, who have invited themselves to be watched, have few moments when they seem to forget that; those instances are when we ostensibly have the clearest insight into their reality. Frankly, it’s still murky, and that seems to be both the point and the irony in the film’s title.
You Can See Everything elevates Nathan Fielder’s reputation far beyond simply a master of cringe humor; there is, here, a glimmer of genius. This story feels almost fateful in its ability to showcase his gifts, illuminating the bottomless strangeness, the infinite complexities, of how humans interact with one another. Even when an idea is big, it’s the little things that matter the most. And in a documentary that promises you can see everything, we learn that it’s up to us to look closely — and even then, what we see might look different in another light.
