Milo Zinser, Photos Editor
Header image © A24
If you had thirty days before beginning a decade-long prison sentence, how would you spend them? Would you go to all your favorite restaurants, see all your family and friends, try to steel yourself for the ten long years ahead?
For Elizabeth Holmes, the answer was much different. In 2023, before entering federal prison, she spent her last weeks working frantically to prove her innocence, not to a judge, but to comedian Nathan Fielder, as shown in Fielder’s new documentary You Can See Everything, which he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim.
Holmes invited Fielder and a film crew into her family’s San Diego rental house so she and her partner Billy Evans could give their account of the events that led her to receive an eleven-year federal prison sentence. This sentence, which she is still serving, is for wire fraud charges related to her now-bankrupt blood-testing firm Theranos, which perpetuated a decade-long fraud. Needless to say, Holmes and Evans’ version was very different from the generally accepted facts of the case.
Fielder is a strange choice for this kind of project: a comedian best known for his awkward persona and satirical reality show Nathan For You, where he “helped” businesses succeed through strange, deceptive and sometimes plainly illegal schemes. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. But it doesn’t at all qualify him for what seems like it should be a serious film.
[You Can See Everything is full of uncomfortably tight closeups, both of Fielder (seen left) and Holmes. Photo: A24]
Or, does it, in some strange way, make Fielder uniquely suited to guide us through the haze of facts and lies around Theranos? As he says to her, they’re both known for pretending to be serious businesspeople. The difference is that Fielder knew he was faking it. Holmes claims she wasn’t, and seriously seems to not realize why the entire world now calls Theranos a sham.
Fielder’s awkward, blunt interview style somehow meshes perfectly with the guarded yet desperate Holmes. He effortlessly penetrates the layer of obfuscation created by her and Evans, both in expected ways like being too stubborn to let a question go, and in left field ones like showing them the iconic comedy routine Who’s On First. Surprisingly, they like Fielder enough to, with about two weeks left until the beginning of Holmes’ sentence, invite him to live with them around the clock. Holmes tells Fielder he “can totally see everything”. This seems like an incredible act of openness for a convicted felon who was known for protecting her carefully cultivated public persona (fittingly, in a very similar way to Fielder’s satirical TV persona).
Throughout his time with Holmes and Evans, Fielder’s behavior swings wildly between serious (questioning her about her alleged crimes) and comical (giving her a box of hair dye in case she wants to flee the country last-minute). These drastic changes force Holmes and Evans to stay on their feet, and allow Fielder to probe in unexpected ways. And that becomes vital, because seemingly as soon as filming starts, it is clear that there are very few facts upon which he, Holmes and Evans all agree.
Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors in Theranos, which she founded in 2003 at the age of nineteen. She was acquitted on charges of defrauding patients. She was ordered to pay nearly half a million dollars in restitution. Her prison sentence was delayed because she was pregnant with her and Evans’ second child. In May 2023, she surrendered voluntarily to a Texas prison.
That much is true. At no point does You Can See Everything or anyone in it question those facts. Everything else, it seems, is up for debate.
According to Holmes (and Evans), the case against her is one colossal misunderstanding. Theranos, they say, was misunderstood when promoting their technology, which had supposedly revolutionized medical testing by developing methods requiring only very small amounts of blood. Holmes says that Theranos intended their lofty promises to come true in the future, with further development. The government, on the other hand says, the company deliberately misled investors and the public.
What led to Holmes’ conviction is the inconvenient fact that Theranos’ technology doesn’t actually work. Many in the biotech sector doubt that it ever will. The film, however, is not particularly interested in the esoteric technical details of Theranos’ machine.
Right until Fielder and the crew travel with Holmes and Evans to the prison, they both aggressively plead “Liz’s” innocence. Then, Fielder takes a two-year break before returning to the documentary. Here, the true villain in this story becomes clear: Billy Evans.
[Right: Holmes and Evans leaving a federal courthouse in 2023. Photo: Associated Press]
Once Holmes is imprisoned, Fielder reveals the details of a pre-production meeting, just days before his crew started shooting. In the meeting, Evans demanded that he and Holmes receive a share of the film’s profits in exchange for his and Holmes’ cooperation. Holmes was not involved in the conversation.
Fielder and Oppenheim begrudgingly agree, though they worry it threatens the project’s integrity. However, Holmes later remarks casually on camera that she’s “not being paid for this.” This opens up the central question of the second act: has Holmes and Evans’ radical transparency actually been an elaborate lie?
Similarly to his television series The Rehearsal, Fielder hires actress Amanda Seyfried to play Holmes in scripted reenactments of moments that the crew couldn’t film, like the meeting with Evans. In an attempt to get new information from Evans, Seyfried and Fielder visit him in Texas, where they discover a surprising level of manipulation, deceit and interference on Evans’ part, even while Holmes herself remains clean.
The two begin by pressing Evans on Holmes’ X (Twitter) account, which has continued to post during her incarceration. He initially claims that she is writing these posts, and he is simply putting them out, but soon admits he writes many of them alone. When Seyfried begins to criticize this, he claims that the power of attorney he has for Holmes is “inalienable” and means that he can do anything he wants on her behalf.
Over the next hour, Fielder and Seyfried explore the extent to which Evans has manipulated Holmes, as his actions go even further. He posts outright, disprovable lies on X, works on launching a (seemingly fraudulent) successor to Theranos, and creates an AI deepfake of Holmes for his use. He claims she is okay with all of this.
Throughout the film, Evans comes off as plainly terrible. He is a manipulator, an abuser, a liar and a chauvinist. He brags to the cameras about his sex life, and becomes aggressive with Seyfried when she questions his claims. He met Holmes at an extremely low point in her life, during Theranos’ collapse, and they were engaged within a year.
Already improperly financially involved, Evans’ interference with the film escalates as Fielder and Seyfried continue to probe. He cuts off access to Holmes, and at one point even forces the crew to stop interviewing a biotech researcher.
Fielder eventually manages to visit Holmes in prison, but is unable to film. During this visit, he asks Holmes several crucial questions regarding Evans’ interference, aiming to learn if she knew or was involved in it. According to him, her answers are incredibly vague, and her behavior cryptic.
Fielder and Seyfried reenact the prison visit, but the accuracy of this begins to collapse when he can’t decide how Holmes answered several questions. It remains unclear if she is cooperating with Evans in lying to the film crew. Here, Seyfried becomes very suspicious. She suggests Fielder, the only witness to the visit, is altering the narrative to protect Holmes, who she thinks he has become overly attached to.
[Left: Holmes entering Federal Prison Camp Bryan in 2023. Photo: ABC News]
In the end, however, I got the sense that the truth of the matter really wasn’t too important. Holmes and Theranos engaged in provable and documented fraud, and she was convicted. She has publicly maintained her innocence. Does it really matter if she believes she is? The evidence against her is overwhelming, and she remains incarcerated. She will spend the rest of her life hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Did Evans interfere with the documentary? Absolutely. Yet strangely, he forfeited the share of profits that had been promised to him. Holmes? I truly don’t know. I don’t think anyone but her and Evans does. Fielder? Quite possibly, but only he and Holmes will ever truly know the events of their conversation.
At its core, You Can See Everything is really about the nature of truth. Directors Fielder and Oppenheim have said that they don’t even agree on what did or didn’t happen. The audience doesn’t either. Draw your own conclusions, or decide that the facts are too nebulous to even try.
Throughout the film, I could not decide whether I felt Holmes was lying. It’s unclear how many of her actions were products of manipulation and abuse from romantic partners. She’s never been single long enough to tell, and both her current and former partner are, by all accounts, terrible men. Her ex-boyfriend Sunny Balwani, a Theranos executive, was also convicted of fraud, and Holmes’ parents imply that he groomed her.
[Right: Evans, Holmes and Fielder after watching a scene from The Dropout, Hulu’s series about Holmes. Photo: A24]
However, I just knew that Evans was lying throughout the film. In this story, he is the manipulator of truth, the man muddying the waters of fact. I saw Obsession, a terrifying allegory for manipulation and abuse, in the same theater, but Evans’ reality was more disturbing than any performance.
In the end, Evans’ life is wrecked. Holmes is in prison, but she will be transferred to a halfway house next year. Fielder and Oppenheim are favorites to win an Oscar for a documentary which obscures the very nature of truth, and that’s the genius of their work.
