In You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes meets her match in comedian Nathan Fielder.

Nathan Fielder's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced CEO of Theranos, has created a cast of intersecting characters that interrogate the nature of being real.

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"No wonder I like, I did a TV show about some kind of business fraud, and you got in trouble for… a business fraud?" comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.

A month before the infamous Theranos CEO surrenders to begin his 11-year felony fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and his wife contacted A24 in a last-ditch effort to exonerate him publicly, offering to send a film crew to document his final days on the loose. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder—a horror-comedy mastermind whose work often straddles the line between fact and fiction—took on the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really was.

"I never made that connection," Holmes says. "I think it's a completely different situation."

No one is better prepared to probe the depths of Holmes' psyche than Fielder. His satirical docu-reality show "Nathan For You" catapulted him to cult stardom, as he played an exaggerated, dead version of himself who tries to help struggling small businesses with supernatural interventions. In one of the early episodes that went viral, Fielder convinces a coffee shop to change its name to "Stupid Starbucks" as a marketing stunt, but consults a lawyer to help him walk the thin line of imitation law. Avoiding legal trouble

"If you'd just say that, you know Theranos was a comedy, maybe you could go free," Fielder tells Holmes.

"I was just joking. Maybe it was in bad taste."

We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. But what we still can't figure out is whether he really means it when he says he did nothing wrong. Even as he sat through the trial — listening to the testimony of investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they announced Theranos blood tests didn't work, and patients who acted on false blood test results — he never wavered.

Throughout Fielder's meta-comedy, even his most devoted fans can't quite figure out when he's playing, when he's being himself, and whether Fielder himself knows where to draw the line.

In this way, Fielder is just like Holmes: After more than a decade in the public eye, audiences are drawn to each of their ambiguous characters.

"The world believes a fact about me that is not true," he tells Fielder. "I know that I have committed no crime."

[The rest of this review contains spoilers.]

Early in the shoot, the New York Times just published a profile of Holmes, which was heavily criticized at the time for allowing Holmes to portray herself as an innocent mother denied the opportunity to watch her children grow up.

However, Holmes and his wife, hotel heir Billy Evans, were furious about the article

At one point in the interview, Holmes tells the Times reporter that he wasn't upset about actress Amanda Seyfried's role in the Hulu miniseries “The Dropout” because “they're not playing me. They play the role of the character that I created."

He and his wife insist the quote was taken out of context. They claim they have evidence that Holmes actually said, "They're playing a character they've created," absolving him of any implication that he admitted to impersonating the CEO of Theranos.

Fielder repeatedly asks Evans to share this evidence so that he can prove that Holmes was misquoted. He never does.

When Holmes reports to the prison, Fielder agonizes as he tries to make something of his moon footage. He enlists a great assistant to help him decipher his puzzling behavior: the same actor who portrayed him in "Leaving."

As Seyfried, Fielder plays a brutal clip from her time with Holmes when she tries to watch "The Turks," the show's own theme. When they arrive at a tense scene involving Holmes' ex-boyfriend and former partner in crime Theranus, Sonny Balwani - who is now in prison - Holmes can't bear to watch this fictional version of himself. She turns and cries.

In other words, Seyfried is watching Holmes react to Seyfried's portrayal of Holmes, who was probably playing a character himself. But Seyfried isn't the only one creating a crude approximation of the real-life Elizabeth Evans, who has created a life-like AI avatar of her husband, trapped inside a large vertical screen, and he walks over to the dinner table to sit with her and her kids as if she's really there.

The rest of the film is a collection of clashing characters. Although it's a non-fiction documentary, it's clear that everyone involved is performing for the cameras to some extent. How could they not? Seyfried's determination to understand Holmes' story seems pure, but it's not forgotten by the audience that she just played the title role in one of the most talked about movies of the year.

Meanwhile, Evans behaves in such an unimaginably brutal way that he may even be playing the villain on purpose to gain sympathy from his hated wife.

Evans knows that Fielder and Oppenheim are not convinced of Holmes' innocence. This documentary does not lead anyone to believe that his wife is wrongly being held in federal custody. But Evans makes herself so horribly unlikable that some viewers might leave the theater seeing her as a victim, allowing her to double down on another persona she adopted during her trial: a harmless, submissive woman manipulated by her ex-partner into unconsciously telling a series of damaging lies.

When Holmes is in prison, Fielder is not allowed to bring tape recorders when he meets with him, so he tries to write a script of their conversations from memory. Trying to accurately recreate the nuances of a conversation where every last word has enormous meaning. With Seyfried reprising her role in The Dropout, we see the pair rehearse the script, editing the language as Fielder tries to remember Holmes' exact phrasing.

"People think Amanda's show is a documentary," says Seyfried of Holmes. "I behave worse in prison because of how he portrays me."

Reading the lines, Seyfried breaks character.

This actor says: I did not do this. "He did it to himself."

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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. He has also written for publications such as Polygon, MTV, Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. He is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Before joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton Fellow in Asia in Laos.

You can contact or confirm Amanda by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message to @amanda.100 on Signal.

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