The new documentary "You Can See Everything," from filmmakers Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, is generating awards-season buzz and rare box-office heat for a nonfiction feature. But its cultural resonance runs deeper than accolades. The film holds a mirror to a defining feature of our century: the uneasy, almost indescribable feeling that what we see around us—in media, in business, in politics—is increasingly manufactured, filtered, and detached from verifiable truth.
At its center is Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder, and her attempt to reconstruct a semblance of normal private and public life after being branded one of the biggest frauds in modern business history. Yet the movie is less a forensic accounting of Theranos's collapse—already exhaustively covered by news investigations, TV dramatizations, and court records—than a meditation on the broader "grift economy" that now pervades our diffuse media landscape, algorithmic echo chambers, and endless platforms for self-serving narratives.
The film zeroes in on the tech-startup ethos of "fake it 'til you make it," which Holmes embodied with a Steve Jobs-like persona—right down to the black turtleneck. She applied that magical thinking to blood testing, just as others have applied it to apps, cryptocurrencies, virtual worlds, and artificial intelligence. But what happens when magical thinking collides with billions in investment and the practice of medicine, a field ostensibly bound by "do no harm"? The documentary raises that question without belaboring the details.
Oppenheim and Fielder instead build the film around a single, telling statement Holmes made to The New York Times in 2023, which Fielder meets with a skeptical squint and a deadpan "OK" worthy of Larry David. That moment becomes a key to unlocking whether Holmes is fundamentally dishonest or fundamentally confused—or perhaps both. It also suggests why Holmes agreed to let the filmmakers embed with her and her partner, Billy Evans, for a few weeks in a San Diego guest house before she began her prison sentence. The couple may have hoped to shape their image, a kind of "docu-washing" that brands have used for decades to shift narratives.
What unfolds on screen, however, is so strange that any attempt at image control seems to backfire. Is Holmes a naive victim—possibly on the autism spectrum, traumatized by a sexual assault at Stanford, and manipulated by the men around her? Or is Evans, with his increasingly erratic behavior and fervent admiration for right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, either losing his grip on reality or cynically positioning for a presidential pardon? Are the two simply confused people in love, trying to build a family, or are they performing agreed-upon roles for Holmes's post-Theranos life?
The film's second half turns a critical eye on the media that have already shaped Holmes's public image, including the Hulu series "The Dropout," which claims to be "based on a true story" but inevitably invents its own version of reality. Dramatic license may not be medical malpractice, but when it comes to real people, it can be its own form of bad faith. The documentary's power lies in its willingness to interrogate not only Holmes and Evans but also the outrage machine that feeds on such stories—and even the filmmakers themselves.
"You Can See Everything" ultimately suggests that seeing is not the same as knowing. In an era of manufactured reality, where digital wealth and physical debt coexist uneasily, the film's greatest achievement is its refusal to offer easy answers. It leaves viewers with the unsettling recognition that the line between truth and performance has never been blurrier—and that we are all, in some way, complicit in the grift. As the documentary's screenings sell out, its relevance to our political and cultural moment only grows.
