Critics Can’t Believe What They’ve Seen in You Can See Everything
Short summary
This is a roundup of early reviews for "You Can See Everything," Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, which premiered at Telluride. Critics mostly agree the film is baffling and unsettling, with its real subject being how documentaries shape truth and how far Fielder's own behavior and assumptions come under scrutiny.
- Critics frame the film as a meditation on documentary ethics, with Alison Willmore arguing it questions what it means to call something nonfiction when editing and framing shape what viewers see.
- Manohla Dargis and Richard Brody both highlight Holmes's blinks, tears, and grip on truth as open questions, and say Fielder's probing turns back on himself, forcing him to revise his own assumptions.
- Reviewers praise the film's style and length: Adrian Horton calls it a masterpiece of who's playing who, and Amy Nicholson notes it runs nearly three hours without losing grip.
Full summary
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim made a documentary called You Can See Everything about Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos founder, and it premiered at Telluride before opening in limited release on October 15. Critics who've seen it are struggling to pin it down. Alison Willmore frames it as a film about the ethics of documentary itself, about what it means to call something nonfiction when it's edited and shaped and the camera misses most of what's happening. That idea runs through the reviews collected here, and it's the thread worth holding onto.
The core of the film is a series of conversations between Fielder and Holmes that get stranger as they go. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times questions whether Holmes's blinks and tears are performance, and whether her grip on language, truth, and science is what it seems. Richard Brody at The New Yorker notes that Fielder's investigation keeps turning back on himself, forcing him to revise his assumptions about Holmes and about life generally. Brody calls the result unpleasant in parts but also strangely beautiful. Adrian Horton in The Guardian praises Oppenheim's tight, probing camera work, which turns ordinary scenes into a parade of guarded motives. Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times says it runs nearly three hours without a dull minute, and warns that one shot in particular shows you everything while hiding what you're actually watching.
The sidebar headlines point to the companion pieces: a feature asking what happens if you simply call Fielder up, a profile of the 30-year-old behind the film, and a piece on the wider audience it has drawn. The reviews agree on one thing above all: this is less a straight Holmes exposé than a film about how much a camera can and can't be trusted to show.