Richard Crouse

SYNOPSIS: In “You Can See Everything,” a new documentary now playing in theatres, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, once the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, allows a film crew led by Nathan Fielder into her home.

CAST: Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, Billy Evans, Amanda Seyfried. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

REVIEW: “You Can See Everything” is being billed as a documentary, but it is more than that. The set up is part reality TV, part fly on the wall and part something else. Something unusual and completely unique.

Five weeks before Elizabeth Holmes was to start her 11 ¼ year sentence for defrauding the investors in her health technology company Theranos Inc, she welcomes a documentary film crew into the home she shares with partner Billy Evans and their young children. They promise “radical transparency,” hence the title “You Can See Everything.”

Directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim move in with the family, intending to capture everyday life and the days leading up to her incarceration. “I think this is the moment in time to capture this story before I’m gone,” Holmes says.

But, what was planned as a five week shoot blossoms into a three-year journey that offers more questions than answers. The Holmes case has been debated in the Amanda Seyfried series “The Dropout,” in print and docudrama, but never as it is here.

The film’s first half is pretty much what you might expect from deadpan king Nathan Fielder. In lowkey fashion he asks intrusive questions, often dripping with skepticism, to pry some sort of accountability from Holmes, who more often than not remains an elusive, inscrutable character.

By times it’s as if Fielder and Holmes are engaged in some sort of staring contest as answers hang in the air between them. It’s a portrait of an awkward public figure and her controlling, chatty husband Billy Evans with some heartfelt moments. In one quiet sequence Holmes, just days away from incarceration, realizes the harsh realities of the life that awaits her. It’s authentic, poignant and one of the few times Holmes allows her real feelings to come to the fore.

It’s in the second half, when it becomes a companion piece to the first hour. that the movie falls down the rabbit hole.

There will be no spoilers here but know that by this time Holmes is in prison, unavailable to the filmmakers. Evans is revealed as a strategic puppet master, albeit one devoted to his wife and children.

What makes the movie so ingenious, and entertaining, and justifies its almost three-hour running time, is the way it approaches its themes.

Without giving away the film’s secrets I can tell you it uses the tropes of documentary filmmaking—re-enactments, fly-on-the-wall camera work, etc—to ask questions about journalistic ethics—How close a documentarian should get to their subject?—the nature of truth—Is it a lie if you really believe it?—and what role the media plays in forming narratives about a famous, or in this case, infamous person.

It’s heady stuff, an exploration into the very heart of perception, self-deception and ultimately, human unknowability. The movie ponders whether Holmes is a victim or a manipulator or if she is a product of a post-truth society where performance equates with authentic.

“You Can See Everything” sees everything, and yet, somehow the more it sees, the less we really understand about what makes Holmes tick. But it’s a wild journey, a documentary quite unlike any other and highly recommended.