Entertainmentupdated 2h ago2 min read
You Can See Everything Follows Elizabeth Holmes Before Her 11-Year Prison Sentence
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Elizabeth Holmes began an 11-year prison sentence in 2023. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film profiles Holmes ahead of imprisonment.
Holmes Meets Fielder
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary “You Can See Everything” follows Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she began an 11-year prison sentence in 2023, as the film opens in 2023 with Fielder invited to film Holmes several weeks before she was due to begin her prison term. Fielder and Oppenheim arrive with a small camera crew at Holmes’ beach house in San Diego, where Holmes is spending her last days of freedom with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children. The documentary frames its title as Holmes’ promise of total access and total transparency, while the film’s premise centers on a skeptical question about why Holmes agreed to partner with Fielder.
“‘Nobody knows who she is,’ Evans says to someone on the phone, shortly before dropping the words ‘radical transparency.’”
Justin Chang describes the film as nearly three hours long and says it premiered as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival, with reviews calling it one of the year’s wildest movie-going experiences. The New York Times describes the movie as a “dizzying movie about truth, reality and the contours of knowledge,” and it notes that the film’s nominal subject is Elizabeth Holmes, the “celebrity jailbird.”
Manipulation and Uncertainty
NPR’s Justin Chang says Fielder and Holmes both come off as “masters of manipulation,” with Fielder devising elaborate comic situations while Holmes appears as a victim of her own delusions at best and a pathological liar at worst.
Holmes tells Fielder, “I'm never told a lie in my life,” and she adds, “Of course I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being.”
Fielder presses Holmes with a deadpan exchange in which he asks, “You're being real right now?” and Holmes answers, “I'm always being real.”
Fielder asks Holmes, “Isn’t it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like … a business scam?” and Holmes responds with “I never actually made that connection.”
Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom.
Prison Looms, Lasers Ahead
Holmes and Billy Evans granted the filmmakers 24/7 access in their beachfront San Diego rental 34 days before she’s set to begin her 11-year sentence in a Texas prison. Holmes and Evans are hard at work on a new tech venture involving lasers, and they are courting investors as her prison term looms. Fielder moves in with Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, in the weeks leading up to her starting her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors with her company's non-functioning blood testing device.
Eventually, the time comes for Holmes to go to prison, and the focus shifts toward Billy Evans. Evans says, “Nobody knows who she is,” and the documentary becomes a self-aware exploration of the relationship between documentarians and their subjects.