You Can See Everything is a surreal, brain-melting documentary

In the crowded field of Silicon Valley swindlers, few have been compulsively cross-examined by the public like Elizabeth Holmes.

The implosion of Theranos, which Holmes built on the fanciful innovation of pin-prick blood tests, inspired a frenzy of breathless news coverage, books, podcasts, documentaries, and an Emmy-awarded miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried.

Yet, the enigmatic lustre of the the woman behind the black turtleneck and windswept hair remains impervious to overexposure.

Despite facing time in jail, Holmes invites Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime) to document her life for a month with seemingly uncurtailed access. By the end, even the filmmakers struggle to comprehend what exactly they've filmed.

The resulting three-hour documentary, You Can See Everything, has become a record-breaking sensation in the month it's taken to reach Australian shores. Its surprise announcement trailer (dropping merely weeks before release) unleashed a viral wave parodying Holmes's glassy eyes and animatronic rigidity.

Online discourse has already pried open each spoiler detail of the film, transforming social media into a minefield. Everyone, from writer Lena Dunham to Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shulz, has weighed in.

The hype, it turns out, is well deserved: Fielder and Oppenheim have crafted the most exquisite obsession of the year.

We're first introduced to Holmes in 2023 from behind the bars of a cot (a wry visual gag recalling Back to the Future), cradling her newborn child.

There are 34 days until she embarks on an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding her investors. She's hemmed in by paparazzi hovering outside her Californian beach house rental while inside, several cameras and a skeleton crew relentlessly follow her and her family, which includes partner Billy Evans and their two young children.

This is, according to Evans, an act of "radical transparency". The Holmes household is straightforward about their extraordinary decision to invite intense, even potentially incriminating scrutiny, into their complicated home life: They've hatched a plan to launch "Theranos 2.0", and hope that the cameras will redeem Holmes's reputation.

After all, there's no such thing as bad publicity, even if their startup is barely more than an idea on a napkin. In between calls to prospective investors, Billy can be seen mainlining microbiology lectures at 2x speed.

Enter Nathan Fielder. A comedian who rose to fame by exploiting legal loopholes and human gullibility to assist struggling small businesses on Nathan For You (see: Dumb Starbucks), his bullshit artistry is redirected into an unflinching interrogation of Elizabeth and Billy, attempting to disentangle the contradictions of a con artist convinced of her own innocence.

It's unusual — and endlessly hilarious — to see a control freak like Fielder lost in someone else's labyrinth. The mesmerising power play between Holmes and Fielder lies in the flickers of recognition they share as innate weirdos who've leveraged their discreet charm into elaborate deceptions. It's Fielder as we've never quite seen him before. He's less concerned with wringing a punchline out of Holmes than he is sharing a private joke with her, his deadpan questioning relaxing into gentle teasing, even flirtation.

He continues to push back against her opaque defences, but as he runs through his usual repertoire — leaning in slightly too close, allowing uncomfortable silences to linger — something resembling intimacy oozes out from between them. When he gazes into Holmes's unblinking eyes, the abyss gazes back.

Co-director Lance Oppenheim, whose impressive narrative debut Primetime only just hit cinemas, reliably revels in the strangeness of it all. The film is less stylised than his prior "docufantasia" films like Some Kind of Heaven, which abandoned the illusion of fly-on-the-wall observation in favour of florid subjectivity, but taps into its own restless wavelength with brutal close-ups, penetrating zooms and rhythmic cross-cutting between conversations.

While Primetime lampooned the Bush era's blood-thirst for moral vengeance, You Can See Everything toys with our desperation to latch onto something real in an increasingly unmoored world.

Is Holmes really a master manipulator, or was she a young visionary preyed upon by her conniving ex-boyfriend, Theranos chief operating officer Sunny Balwani? Does she sincerely believe she's never lied in her entire life? When she breaks down after a phone call about her impending prison sentence, framed from above like Joan of Arc, is she merely shedding crocodile tears?

There's no shortage of maddeningly ambiguous moments demanding to be pored over in forensic detail. A scene in which Holmes attempts to whisk an omelette offers a tantalising glimpse into her relationship with Billy, not least because Fielder is willing to vocalise the unspoken tension of the moment; Oppenheim shrewdly trains the camera onto the bowl before it's taken out of her hands.

Just as in his TV shows, there is no loose thread that Fielder won't unravel until the bitter end. The punchline lies in just how far he's able to warp reality to meet his needs and to coax people out of their comfort zone, not least himself. For this reason, I haven't even touched upon the sublime second half, which cracks open the film in surreal, brain-melting fashion.

In capitulating to our obsession with Holmes, You Can See Everything is the rare film to elicit a queasy feeling of complicity in its audience. It's unquestionably perverse to be observing a mother's final days with her infant child in the lead-up to a decade-long prison sentence — even if she is ultimately playing us. Her mannered poise in the face of an ever-present film crew belies a desperate bid to wrest back control over her image. The spectre of The Dropout looms over the film, with Holmes noting how many people have mistaken it for a documentary.

Like any remotely public figure, Holmes has since been deepfaked into oblivion in recent years. As glimpsed in the film's trailer, Elizabeth voluntarily scans herself into an infinitely malleable 3D proxy on Billy's advice, so that he can prop up her virtual presence while she's behind bars. We may never be able to trust a video of Elizabeth Holmes again.

By focusing so intently on Holmes, Fielder and Oppenheim end up unveiling the cultural shifts of Silicon Valley in the past decade, mapped to her transition from girlboss to stay-at-home mum to disembodied virtual avatar. Tech fraud has never run so rampant and been punished so little; Elizabeth Holmes's biggest mistake was getting in the door too early.

You Can See Everything is in cinemas now.