In this age of social and immediate media, viewers come to new releases with varying degrees of exposure. With "You Can See Everything" this has several levels. There were, for me, the trailer with Elizabeth Holmes’s "why would I deceive you" line and Nathan Fielder’s frustrated but coy facial reaction. And then there were videos imitating Holmes’s line and doing psychological analysis of Fielder’s face. There were social media posters who gave primers on the Theranos swindle (which I had no clue about), those who provided reviews of the already screened series "Drop Out" (2022) about this scandal (I hadn’t seen it), and favorite moments of Nathan Fielder’s previous work (had never heard of him before). By the time I saw the film I had some knowledge of the characters and what you know about them seriously impacts what you get out of the film.
Firstly, it is a documentary of sorts, so I don’t know if the concept of "spoiler" applies here. It’s about an entrepreneur who lied to her investors and is about to go to jail, and she goes to jail. One could even argue that "You Can See Everything" doesn’t fulfill the promise of a documentary: that of informing the public. In a very strange way, the film redefines what a spoiler can mean. For me, the spoilers are in how the story is told, the various narrative levels Fielding manages to get into the film.
Documentary has always been an experimental medium; fiction film posing as documentary, documentary posing as fiction and all the colors in between. The closest thing I can think of to "You Can See Everything" is Kaouther Ben Hania’s "Four Daughters" (2023), where Ben Hania (whom we never see) hangs out in the home of a traumatized family. We see various family members tell their story; we see parts of the story being acted by professional actors; we see the characters give advice to the actors as to how they should play them, and we even see them act their parts themselves. There are very similar layers in Fielder’s film, and revealing them in a review feels like the ultimate spoiler.
One moment where Fielder comes uncomfortably close to Ben Hania’s work is where he has Amanda Seyfried, who has already played Holmes in the 2022 series, play Holmes as speaking on the phone to Fielder from jail – because apparently Fielder cannot legally show the real footage of their conversation. This is the inverse of what happens in Ben Hania’s "The Voice of Hind Rajab" (2025). While Ben Hania’s film is a fictional recreation of what happened at the Red Cross Call Centre, the only real footage is Hind’s own voice, calling from the car where IDF soldiers kept shooting at her after they had already killed her family.
Throughout the film, Fielder asks you to shift your understanding of who the narrator is. It opens with Fielder going into Holmes’s "holiday home," and this is where I am already thrown off the track of truth. The camera is still our best friend, though, because it does focus on the sign that makes it clear this is a rental home, and that we will actually get absolutely no insight as to how the Holmes-Evans household works. I wait for some comment as to maybe it’s at least the cottage where they often come to, but no. Nothing. The "home" we are shown could easily be a hangar in Universal Studios.
The other thing that bugged me immensely about the "home situation" of the couple is that with two kids they seemed to have no help – no cleaners and no nannies, which felt extremely untruthful. It takes a village to raise a single child, not two socially maladjusted yuppies. This was enough for me to readjust the genre of the film in my head. No documentary about a couple raising two kids can do without help. Nobody seems to comment on this aspect of the film, and yet there are endless videos on how they made Fielder sleep on a bed without a mattress, without acknowledging that this is not their home, and they probably don’t know where half the amenities are.
In the first half, Fielder spends socially awkward time with the couple that shows us how privileged they are, and what lies their relationship is based on. Holmes’s parents come to visit this rented bungalow, and her father drops an immense bombshell as Fielder is trying to get some background information on Holmes. Again, this piece of information may already have been made public in the "Drop Out" series, but it was new to me, and I’m thankful no one had touched upon it in their various explanatory videos.
One spoiler that I had to contend with is an interaction between Holmes and Fielder which social media users tried to make sense of. When Fielder’s time with Holmes in the holiday home ends, in the second half of the film Fielder invites Seyfried to the same place, and they dissect the footage of the first half. This provides a good test case when it comes to acting/being yourself – there are various discussions about how much of Fielder’s stay with Holmes was scripted. The second half with Seyfried, which is supposed to be a "document" of how they dissect Holmes, feels very scripted, and you can see Seyfried is acting. You can compare this section to BBC’s "Gogglebox," which is reality TV, with real people commenting on the TV programs they watch. Next to Seyfried’s acting in this second half, Fielder’s performance in the first half feels very real, which suggests that first bit was a real documentary, or that Fielder is a better actor than Seyfried.
At one point in the second half, we see Fielder look out of the window and remember an interaction between himself and Holmes. Who is showing us this memory? It is at this moment we feel a narrator that is outside and above Fielder, the ultimate director who has used bits of documentary and fiction film to present us with "You Can See Everything." With this master stroke, Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim turn the whole narrative into a sort of maze, making the bewildered audience rush to their favorite social media sites to post commentaries and explainers.
