Seeing is (Not) Believing: Subjectivity in You Can See Everything
Review by staff writer Caleb Lee can be found here.
On a foggy morning in San Diego, as the waves lap gently against the shore, Elizabeth Holmes gives Nathan Fielder her definition of a lie: “intentionally saying something you believe to be untrue.”
Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything (2026) hinges on “believability,” this slippery subjectivity that repeatedly falls out the grasp of the directors and the audience alike. Their film asks you to consider truth and untruth, lies and obfuscation, memory and forgetting—themes that are certainly not foreign to the documentary genre. They also seem like logical ways to approach the subject matter, since Holmes, who was convicted in 2022 on charges of defrauding investors of her biotech startup company Theranos, is best known to the general public as a liar.
It is inevitable, then, that a documentary on her last days of freedom before her 11-year prison sentence would interrogate this central piece of her public identity: her trustworthiness. The film starts as an investigation of Holmes, constructing a domestic courtroom with Fielder as a litigator trying to understand his subjects, the camera as an impartial witness, and the audience as the jury tasked with coming to their own conclusions.
In addition to Holmes, the documentary’s subjects also include her partner Billy Evans, who certainly makes his presence known by interrupting interviews and lodging complaints about the Wi-Fi; her two young children, who are shown playing and napping; and her parents, who, though their visits are brief, speak eagerly and candidly about their daughter.
The Holmes family (and Fielder, who moves in with them during the filming process) are constantly watched, pinning themselves under a microscope to prove their authenticity. The camerawork makes this metaphor literal: extreme close-up shots focus on everything from a yellow mixing bowl, the site of a tense moment between Holmes and Evans, to an open Google Doc on Holmes’ computer displaying her memoir-in-progress. Their most frequent subject is her large, piercing blue eyes, which stare unblinkingly and beguilingly at the camera as if daring you to question what she says.
The close-up on Holmes’ memoir draft creates one of the first (and few) moments she is seen expressing dismay at the presence of the cameras. She is aware that the unfiltered, unfinished thoughts she wrote on the page have been captured and will be shown to an audience. In a conversation with Evans in the garage, she expresses this frustration; the moment is captured from what appears to be inside the house using a long-range zoom-in. By bringing the audience into this clear attempt to get away from the cameras, the visibility of the subjects is further heightened.
These close-up and zoomed-in shots give the illusion that you’re seeing the entire picture, understanding things as they are. Their invasiveness is rewarding. Fielder and Oppenheim are giving the audience the spectacle they want: you are finally, finally inside. You are close enough to see through her lies, but also, as Fielder remarks, close enough to be swayed.
The dialogue in the film is also examined in this manner, with Fielder incessantly prodding at certain turns of phrase. His back-and-forth with Holmes over whether the Theranos device “could” or was “capable of” running any diagnostic blood test—and how that language might be misleading to other people—is darkly comedic. Fielder adds to this humor by pointing out the ironic connection between Holmes’ business fraud and his 2013 docu-reality comedy show Nathan for You, where he serves as a satirical business consultant for struggling companies.
The absurdity of the interaction is further emphasized by Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” bit that Fielder plays for her and Evans later on. The two men maintain that she doesn’t get the joke, but in a way, she nails the heart of it: it’s funny because Abbot and Costello are “talking past each other.” Neither person stops to ask where the confusion is coming from, both concerned only with their own truth—it’s all Holmes knows, in her own words. The film’s aim here is not to ask the audience whether they believe Holmes committed fraud or not; that bridge has been crossed. Rather, the central questions become: do we believe that Holmes believes she is innocent? Is she deluding us, or herself?
The film slowly creeps outward from this interiority, moving away from Holmes entirely after she is incarcerated. This distance makes her even more unknowable: she cannot be seen or recorded. Evans refers to her at one point as an “impossible subject.” Though this description is apt, it is somewhat ironic: Holmes’ partner allows her image to be used and misused through billboards, stage plays held at a strip club, and AI models, even going as far as to impersonate her by using her X (formerly Twitter) account without her permission. What we believe to be Holmes is no longer her; her name, image, and voice are attached to things she has never said or done.
Despite Fielder’s disgust at these actions, the film itself cannot escape from appropriating Holmes’ image in its own ways. There are key events not caught on camera that are depicted through recreations: Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu’s 2022 miniseries The Dropout, reprises her role.
In this second half, Fielder becomes more of a subject than a director, with Oppenheim shaping the viewers’ image of him as much as he shapes Holmes and Evans’ images. Holding a camera does not exempt Fielder from subjecthood, and his role in the story becomes less and less impartial—and thus less and less believable. The introduction of Seyfried and the reenactments reveal that Fielder has been keeping things from the audience: we never saw his first (or second) meeting with Holmes. This feels like crucial information, the withholding of which means the viewer no longer feels that they are “in on” something with Fielder.
By making Fielder both subject and director, the documentarian’s role is disrupted. Their job is not solely to transmit information from the subject to the audience with as little personal intervention as possible; Fielder’s shift from trustworthy to untrustworthy makes it clear that in order to get that information, the director must, fundamentally, disrupt the “realistic” diegesis of the documentary.
You Can See Everything is especially effective at making viewers question the truth because of this dual director dynamic: when the audience sees Fielder’s non-partisan role falter, they can lean on Oppenheim to capture what’s “really happening.” However, because the viewer has been misled once before, they naturally begin to doubt Oppenheim’s directorial authority as well as documentary as a truth-centered genre. Everything is a performance that can—and should—be questioned.
In one of the film’s most innovative sequences, Fielder has Seyfried reenact his visit to see Holmes in prison. The sequence crosscuts between a recreation of their conversation, narrated by Fielder, and a recording of him and Seyfried reading, analyzing, and changing the script together in her living room. As a result, the script is entirely unverifiable by the audience, Seyfried, and even Fielder himself, who questions whether Holmes finished a phrase with “it” or “something,” a one-word difference that paints two very contradictory images of Holmes—one in which she is a victim, and one in which she is a conspirator.
There is a point where Seyfried asks Fielder if his “protectiveness” towards Holmes may be preventing him from including information that might make her look bad, to which he claims impartiality. Regardless of whether this is a bit or not (it’s hard to tell with Fielder, as always), the claim is laughably nonsensical: we have just watched him lead with emotion for over an hour, and his feelings of curiosity, frustration, and something else that surpasses documentarian or even platonic concern have made the investigation infinitely more compelling. The reenactments Fielder and Seyfried create are no less believable than any other depictions of Holmes the audience has been presented with already.
By its end, the documentary has become less about whether or not Holmes is telling the truth or whether or not we can even make this judgment—if it was ever truly interested in this question in the first place. The film becomes concerned with a much broader question, reaching beyond the confines of the particularities and peculiarities of her story into the documentary genre as a whole.
The film becomes a documentary about image formation, a documentary of a man making a documentary about a woman and her family and her lies. All of the contradictions of the form are laid bare: there is no objectivity. There is nothing without the ineluctable presence of the camera. Everything is, at its core, a performance; a re-remembering or a forced forgetting.
When Fielder is initially debating how to capture the aforementioned prison conversation, Seyfried tells him that in lieu of recording, he has to “believe in himself.” Here, the camera is a crutch, a machine that we believe can capture some absolute truth untouched by the failings of human emotions and memory. But, by removing the apparatus entirely from this moment, by denying it any presence at all, You Can See Everything beautifully demonstrates that the camera was never capable of being objective. Recording every moment, zooming in on every expression, replaying lines of dialogue over and over again, agonizing over tone and word choice: none of these move us towards the truth. Is it “could” or “capable”? Is it “it” or “something”? Does it matter? Not really.
Nothing, not even the medium we believe captures life most completely and objectively, means anything if you don’t believe in it.
Hannah Smith is a senior in Columbia College majoring in Film and Media Studies and East Asian Studies. When she’s not at the movies, you can find her listening to music, dancing, or reading.