Elizabeth Holmes spent years telling investors her blood-testing startup could do the impossible. Now a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim turns the camera on the final weeks before she reported to prison — and, according to a Daily Wire review, finds the filmmaker himself becoming the story.
“You Can See Everything” follows Holmes as she prepares to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors in Theranos. Fielder moves in with her family to document their daily life, a setup Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans, reportedly hoped might rehabilitate her public image — or at least show a more human side. Daily Wire media critic Paulina Enck, who reviewed the film, calls it “easily among the most gripping documentaries in years,” blending the tension of a thriller with a self-aware examination of its own making.
A family portrait, with cracks
The film does humanize its subjects. Holmes and Evans are shown as supportive partners and parents — playing with their children, praising each other’s intelligence, sharing the casual affection of a happy household. Evans is seen comforting Holmes when the reality of her looming prison term overwhelms her, which, per the review, happens often.
But the portrait has its fissures. Holmes comes across as warm, even intensely intimate with Fielder, while Evans is described as openly hostile — not only toward the filmmaker but sometimes toward Holmes herself. According to the review, he frequently speaks on his fiancée’s behalf, interrupts her conversations with Fielder even when she seems content to keep talking, and at times discusses her more like a hyperintelligent child than an adult partner. His hostility toward Fielder reportedly extends into odd displays of dominance: looming over the shorter filmmaker, staring him down, and, in one sequence the review calls unnecessary, showering on camera and fully exposing himself.
The result, Enck writes, is that in a film about a woman famous for both her intensity and her lies — paired with a director who lives on the line between reality and fiction — the boyfriend somehow emerges as the villain. Whether that, too, is a matter of framing remains an open question.
No breakdown coming
Viewers hoping to watch Holmes crack under her steadfast declarations of innocence will be disappointed. The film isn’t built around a confession or a moment of collapse. Instead, per the review, it explores the more unsettling prospect of trying to understand someone whose conviction in her own account seems to shape an almost alien relationship with language and the world around her.
One sequence distills the dynamic: Fielder shows Holmes and Evans the classic “Who’s on first” comedy routine. Holmes recognizes it’s funny but can’t grasp the elementary wordplay, a moment the review reads as an allegory for the pair talking past each other — and for the deeply odd triangle at the film’s center.
A runtime approaching three hours might sound punishing, especially with such difficult subjects at the middle of it. The review says the opposite: each hour complicates the narrative further, and each turn pulls the viewer closer to the edge of the seat.
The twist that resets the film
Despite its billing, the documentary becomes increasingly meta-textual — a film about its own creation that studies its creator as much as its subject. Fielder, not Holmes, is the star, an outcome the review finds hard to imagine being avoided had he stayed strictly behind the camera.
The structure effectively splits into three acts. Just past the 60-minute mark, Holmes turns herself in and goes to prison. After an emotional farewell to her family and an unexpectedly tender hug with Fielder, the review admits to wondering how nearly two more hours could possibly follow when the subject is now unreachable for more than a decade.
Then comes the turn that redirects the entire film: Fielder sits on a sofa in an unfamiliar living room, screening highlights from the previous hour for another wide-eyed blonde — actress Amanda Seyfried.
With his original subject gone, Seyfried becomes something of a surrogate. She was brought in, per the review, to reprise her Emmy-winning portrayal of Holmes in recreations of meetings that took place before cameras were present, adding another layer of artifice. At first she functions as a voice of reason, asking the questions much of the audience is likely already thinking, and her relative normality only underscores how strange Holmes and Evans come across. As the film goes on, though, Seyfried reveals oddities of her own, growing increasingly self-focused and centering herself in the story.
The back half largely drops the question of Holmes’s own sense of guilt, turning instead to Evans’s motives and to Fielder’s eroding professional detachment.
Sympathy, suspicion, and a camera that can’t see everything
If anything about Holmes can be believed, the review argues, it’s her devotion to her family. She adores Evans and her children with striking intensity. Whether that devotion is returned in equal measure, whether Evans is using her notoriety for some confusing purpose, or whether something else is going on, stays unclear.
That ambiguity may be a trick of the filmmaking, or it may be viewers projecting innocence onto a sweet-seeming mother while distrusting the less agreeable man beside her. Holmes is a convicted fraudster serving 11 years for defrauding investors and appears to feel no guilt for her crimes, the review notes — yet seeing her with her children and her near-religious devotion to Evans produces a sympathy that’s hard to shake. Evans’s controlling behavior is likewise recognizable; most people have never been defrauded investors or misled by a faulty medical test, but nearly everyone has known a man with those tendencies taking advantage of a far more invested partner.
Or none of it could be real. Holmes ranks among the most notorious liars and fraudsters of the era. Evans knowingly began a relationship with her at the height of the scandal and has shown comfort with untruth himself, according to the review. And Fielder is, ultimately, making a movie meant to entertain at least as much as to inform. Even a film that interrogates its own biases isn’t fully trustworthy — as the review puts it, we cannot, in fact, see everything.
The central question the documentary poses, Enck writes, is whether an objective film can be made about someone you’ve grown to love. “You Can See Everything” answers no. But the less conventional, deeply personal result is far more absorbing than a standard treatment would have been — a trade-off the review considers worth taking.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/you-can-see-everything-when-the-documentarian-becomes-the-con