A24 has unveiled a new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that Nathan Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim have been making in secret for three years, offering unprecedented access to the disgraced Theranos founder.
Titled You Can See Everything, the film’s official description reads: “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”
Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of fraud and conspiracy for lying about the capabilities of her biotech company’s blood testing technology and conning investors out of millions of dollars. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
A teaser trailer for the new documentary, released Monday, shows Nathan For You star Fielder quizzing Holmes while staring deeply into her eyes.
“I don’t have anything to deceive you on,” Holmes tells him. “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.”
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open image in gallery“OK. Alright. OK, good chat,” Fielder replies, before adding, “You’re being real right now?”
“I’m always being real,” she says.
For anyone familiar with Fielder’s work, the trailer’s uneasy exchange is likely no surprise. The comedian has built a career on blurring the line between reality and performance, often inserting an extra awkward version of himself into elaborate social experiments and letting situations — and the people caught up in them — grow increasingly strange and uncomfortable.
In the 2010s satirical docu-series Nathan for You, he would devise outlandish schemes to help struggling businesses with outlandish, expensive, and ultimately comedic marketing techniques.
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His 2020s series The Rehearsal took that premise even further, with Fielder constructing elaborate simulations of real-life situations so people could rehearse difficult conversations and events before they happened — only for the increasingly elaborate scenarios to blur the line between what was real and what was staged.
You Can See Everything premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Sunday, where it was shrouded in mystery until the screening actually began.
open image in galleryAccording to the L.A. Times, attendees had to lock their phones in pouches during the screening and were told security personnel with night-vision goggles would watch for anyone using electronic devices.
Fielder was then brought out on stage alongside Oppenheim — the documentarian behind Some Kind of Heaven and the new Robert Pattinson-starring Chris Hansen film Primetime.
“I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced in this,” Fielder told the crowd. “I don’t quite know what I went through.”
On Instagram, viewers of the teaser trailer appeared equally unsettled.
“Is Elizabeth Holmes gonna get nominated for Best Actress cause that was more unsettling than Pattinson as Chris Hansen,” wrote one commenter.
“I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my life,” added another.
“This rocked me,” wrote a third.
You Can See Everything will release theatrically in October.
Holmes began serving her 11-year sentence in May 2023 at a federal prison in Texas. Her listed release date at the Federal Bureau of Prisons is currently March 19, 2032.