"You can see everything" is finally here, but A24 is still hoping to get past the stealth hype.
The Elizabeth Holmes documentary has managed to keep its biggest twists since it was released to the world in September. It is now the focus of an extensive broadcast and awards season.
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Oscar season boils down to building a winning narrative. Studios and advertising activists are tactical in choosing the right festival, the right place and the right situation to unveil their products and carefully provide the right context for the audience to appreciate a film and receive an award if it is successful. But A24 broadcasts a somewhat different approach with its Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything: See it, especially before you know anything else about it.
After three years of secret production, the film was revealed to the world for the first time with a mystery screening at the Telluride Film Festival. There, the film's directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, implored the sold-out audience not to spoil its most obscure twists. "You Can See Everything" kicked off a somewhat quiet season, with awards prognosticators canonizing the filmmaker as a serious threat to become the first documentary to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination. RELATED STORIES 'La Bola Negra': Netflix's gay saga must survive a split between its directors to star in Alex Garland's new Oscar frontrunner New Sci-Fi on A24
Six weeks later, the film is now playing in about 800 theaters across North America and has opened to $8 million for the first time, which is practically the highest grossing figure for a documentary. Two other sold-out screenings have been held at the New York Film Festival and the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. The show at NYFF (where A24 launched last year's viral marketing "Marty Supreme") was so popular that a Lincoln Center programmer shared a post lamenting not being able to get a seat. And although NYFF typically shares videos of its Q&A online, the organization agreed with A24 to withhold posting the post-screening conversation between Fielder, Oppenheim and festival director Dennis Lim until the weekend of the screening.
This unusual gesture of secrecy is in line with co-directors' hope that how the documentary unfolds will invite its few viewers so far into an atmosphere of the series that began with its secretive production conditions, already mythologized among the press and Fielder's followers. As Fielder shared in the Q&A, "You Can See Everything" first began with a crew of seven visiting the home of Holmes and his partner, Billy Evans, in 2023. The small group documented Holmes in the month leading up to his 11-year prison sentence for wire fraud and defrauding investors in his tech startup.
The cat remained in the bag for almost three years, except for a 2025 report by freelance journalist Jeff Snyder detailing a rumor about Fielder's work on a project that included visiting Holmes in prison. When IndieWire sent a text about the piece to a source close to the project, they initially did not respond. Later, when spoken to in person, they claimed they did not respond because they were legally prohibited from doing so. A24 declined to comment for this story.
Non-disclosure agreements are not an uncommon part of the extra workers and crew members agreeing to film production, although their scope of content can vary widely. According to the Wall Street Journal and Variety, the NDA was used in Fielder's HBO documentary series "The Rehearsal," which gives the comedian a chance to practice difficult conversations with hired actors and complex sets. While some subjects have broken those conventions, the show has largely managed to maintain its biggest week-to-week revelations. But, perhaps more fundamentally, they also limit viewers' ways to make Fielder's signature ability to push the limits of conventional behavior clear in highly constructed situations, allowing viewers to figure out where one begins and the other ends on their own.
With "You Can See Everything," Fielder finds a kindred spirit with Oppenheim, whose documentaries such as HBO's "Ren Fer" and FX's "The World of Sperm" are based on the formal premise of inviting subjects directly into filmmaking. Throughout his work, Oppenheim's process involves collaborating with the people being documented, helping them recreate important moments in their lives, and sometimes even creating expressionistic compositions that They come out of reality and beautifully reflect the psyche of the subjects. Fielder and Oppenheim's blatant reconstruction of documentary reality drives You Can See Everything in its epic running time of nearly three hours, especially in the second half of the film, after Holmes goes to prison and the crew is forced to reconsider how to continue the project with limited access to him.
That's when "You Can See It All" becomes a really weird awards show, and the production invites a big-name actor on board. In pre-screening introductions, Fielder and Oppenheim have asked audiences not to discuss the cast's identity or the nature of their contributions, but that hasn't stopped some awards prognosticators from predicting the film in the supporting performance categories. IndieWire understands that the promoters behind the "You Can See It All" awards campaign aren't providing specific guidance for the awards show about hiding the presenter's identity.
Some films keep an actor's role largely unknown until the film's release. Consider Kevin Spacey's serial killer in "Se7en" or Matt Damon's fugitive coward in "Interstellar." But the modern era of Oscar jockeys has not seen such a film. And that's not even mentioning the weird idea of nominating an actor who comes from a documentary, no matter how entertaining it is.
The quirky awards for You Can See Everything, with unique features in several award categories, feels like an odd aftershock to the film itself, teasing audiences to put their finger on what's real and what's not. Even Fielder, who often hovers above his work with a detached, Machiavellian pose, has claimed that the question troubles even him. As he expressed during his Telluride Q&A, "I'm still not sure what I've experienced." In a media landscape defined by aggressive promotional gauntlets and sleight-of-hand readings of every film, a film's ability to completely wow viewers is an irreplaceable commodity — even if it's a first impression that's as aggressively crafted as any other awards player.
A24's You Can See Everything is in theaters now.