Can you see everything?

This review contains spoilers. I have heard it said that of all the drugs, fame is the most addictive. For Elizabeth Holmes, at least, I am willing to believe that is true. It is the only explanation for You Can See Everything, a movie that is, at its core, about several varieties of manipulation. Holmes, as the CEO of Theranos, was a business-world celebrity: a woman who’d built a private company valued at $9 billion around a miniaturized blood testing platform that supposedly let people test just a drop of blood for a variety of ailments. She had a deal with Walgreens, speaking gigs, a New Yorker profile, a cover story in Fortune; Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch was among her investors and Henry Kissinger sat on Theranos’ board. The company crumbled after John Carreyrou, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, broke the story in 2015 that Theranos wasn’t using its own technology to run most of its blood tests. Only 15 tests were run on the Theranos machine, and insiders had doubts about their accuracy. In 2021, I spent four months sitting through Holmes’ trial for fraud. She was found guilty of one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud. The evidence supporting that verdict was damning: forged memos that appeared to be from pharmaceutical companies Theranos had done testing for; recordings of Holmes lying about doing testing in Afghanistan with the American military and claiming Theranos could perform more than 1,000 tests on its proprietary machines, even though only 200 were listed as options on the website because “we have operationalized certain tasks, expecting a certain set of ordering patterns.” Several Theranos employees testified they’d told her their misgivings about the accuracy of the proprietary tests, only to be summarily dismissed. They faced harassment and retaliation as a result of talking to Carreyrou — nastygrams from Theranos lawyers, bizarre investigations from Fusion GPS, and private investigators tailing them. In one case, Holmes nearly destroyed the relationship between a man and his grandfather. (You can read the grandson’s review of the movie here.) These specifics do not appear in You Can See Everything. That isn’t its project; the film assumes you have some familiarity with the Theranos scandal. Holmes approached A24, the studio behind the film, to see if it would be willing to do a documentary; cringe comedian Nathan Fielder found out and asked if he could call her. Fielder and his team filmed Holmes’ last month of freedom, and then stayed in contact for two more years as she served her sentence. The question the film poses is: Can you trust her? This is not, if you were immersed in the details of the criminal case, a question. (No. Obviously.) What is fascinating is that Fielder got sucked in anyway. Early in the film, Fielder asks Holmes if she has chosen him to tell the story because he isn’t a science journalist, and it’ll be easier to get one over on him. She says she sees it as a human story. She feels she has been misunderstood. She isn’t the fraudster people — like me, I suppose — made her out to be. She wasn’t lying to anyone. She really believed in her invention. As she says this, she is wide-eyed, making eye contact with Fielder. Her face is placid, even peaceful. She appears to be fully convinced. At one point, she insists she’s never told a lie at all, not once in her life. It is a spectacular performance. I might even have believed some of what she was saying, if I hadn’t seen hundreds of pages of documents from her trial. At one point, she tells Fielder that when she said her machine “can” perform all those tests, she meant the machine can, if you make the hypothetical chemistry for the tests, perform the tests. A future-tense “can,” if you will. (And a somewhat tautological one.) This was not an entirely novel talking point; in fact, it was the reason that one day of the trial contained a grammar lesson. Fielder’s response was to try to take this future-tense “can” seriously, or as seriously as he can, by showing Holmes “Who’s on first,” a 1945 comedy routine by Abbott and Costello that she professes not to have heard of. (It is so famous that my first contact with it was my father doing both sides of the routine verbatim when I was perhaps five. The routine is almost 10 years older than he is.) Holmes laughs along, then when asked what’s funny, appears to draw a blank. She is seemingly unable to produce the name of the first baseman. I find it difficult to believe that a grown woman cannot comprehend a comedy routine that I understood as an ordinary five-year-old. But Holmes has to commit to not understanding it, because to admit she understands it is to admit she understands why the future-tense “can” misled people. Her partner, Billy Evans, offers that her mind doesn’t work like other people’s. This is true, in its way. One of the reasons that Fielder, a master manipulator himself, winds up so entangled in Holmes’ story is that he isn’t going to the written records. The only meaningful appearance of Theranos-era Holmes is a brief recorded clip of her talking to journalist Roger Parloff, which is what kicks off the “can” discussion. In the absence of any kind of permanent record, talking to someone who appears perfectly confident and candid while they lie is a mind-bending experience. Onscreen, Fielder wants to believe her. He doesn’t, not really. But he wants to. Later, we do see text: an iMessage from Holmes to Fielder, the line from which the title is drawn, reassuring him that he can move in with the couple. He can see everything. It is, in context, a normal use of the word “can.” Because I was not preoccupied with the same thing as onscreen Fielder — trying to figure out whether Holmes was “fully sincere” or “the most manipulative person who ever lived” — I was watching, instead, how the manipulation works. In the early shots, Fielder is lurking awkwardly in the background, or around the corner from Holmes in a shot. But Holmes draws him in, asking him what he thinks, engaging him in conversation. Holmes’ penchant for eye contact does a lot of it; at one point, Fielder asks her how she and Billy met, and whether she was flirting with him. She was. He asks how she flirts. She says, while holding eye contact with Fielder, by holding eye contact at length. Fielder and Holmes are often in very close physical proximity, which is emphasized by Lance Oppenheim’s (and Fielder’s) direction. In some scenes, they appear to be about to kiss. This is notable largely because of who Holmes operates best on: men. She was surrounded by them at Theranos — the only girl in the boys’ club. But the seduction here isn’t the femme fatale style of noir movies. It’s eye contact, active listening, physical proximity. She is giving Fielder — and, I presume, the other men in her life — the feeling of being fully heard and understood. On top of that, there’s a second level of seduction operating: the promise that you, the person she is talking to, are uniquely qualified to understand her, because you are special. One question that my court experience didn’t really answer for me was how Holmes did it. I did not find her especially compelling in her public appearances. She was good on the stand — far and away the best defendant I’ve seen testifying on their own behalf in any civil or criminal case — but not especially seductive. The film showed that she operates best one on one. Her charisma isn’t about her. Not exactly. It’s about how she makes her interlocutor feel. And she’s very good. Because when Evans tries to evoke the same thing with Fielder — suggesting to him that Holmes has been misunderstood and thus persecuted, but Fielder is special enough to see Holmes’ side of the story — Fielder sees through it. “I know what you’re feeling,” Evans says to Fielder. Fielder immediately dismisses this as an absurdity: “No, you don’t.” Evans’ relationship with Holmes is the primary focus of the last two-thirds of the documentary, and it is similarly fascinating to anyone with background knowledge about Holmes. During the Theranos years, she was in a relationship with Sunny Balwani, who was later her codefendant in the fraud trial. Holmes successfully got their trials severed by claiming her relationship with Balwani was abusive. Early in the documentary, Evans takes a bowl of eggs from Holmes to beat them more forcefully than she does, before handing it back. Holmes tells Fielder that Evans doesn’t like how she beats eggs, implying he does this a lot. Before Holmes goes to jail, Evans has her photographed to create an avatar of herself, like a hologram, that can be used to create what are, effectively, deepfakes generated from letters she might write. When Fielder raises the concern that AI deepfakes may be made of Holmes nude or in compromising positions, Evans essentially shrugs. Evans has also taken over Holmes’ X account, and is writing some distinctly non-Holmes-like posts on it. He didn’t get the password from her — he says he got it from X employees. Before Holmes goes in to be recorded for her hologram, she tells Fielder that she doesn’t like having her picture taken, and that she didn’t like all the press around Theranos. This sticks with Fielder as a concern about Evans, about the possibility that Evans is manipulating Holmes. It does not seem to trouble him that this is in complete conflict with inviting an entire film crew into your home to make a documentary about you. Holmes seems to have activated some kind of protective instinct in Fielder. But Holmes loves attention, the record shows. In the Theranos days, Balwani texted her he was worried about “overexposure,” which she immediately dismissed; she wrote to him about using the media to “drown out and refute the crap.” Holmes likes the attention and thinks she can control it. This is clear from Evans’ operation as a proxy. When Fielder starts talking to Holmes’ parents about what she was like before Evans, he interrupts and herds them away. Fielder told Wired that this was a problem throughout production: “Sometimes we’d be trying to do shoots, and Billy would be trying to stop it or just be like, ‘That’s enough time.’” Holmes’ relationship with Evans is one where Evans views himself as in control — as he is with the AI-generated imagery of Holmes and with her X account. He tells Fielder that he just knows what she would want — evoking Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, with his visions of Caprica Six — and so he doesn’t have to ask her. Fielder, understandably, finds that alarming. But Fielder himself has summoned up his own fake Holmes: Amanda Seyfried, the most sensible person in the entire documentary. Seyfried shows up both as herself — as a kind of audience stand-in for Fielder — and to reenact interactions that took place off-camera, effectively reprising her turn as Holmes in the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Seyfried is there to reenact Holmes’ and Fielder’s off-camera interactions, particularly a confounding episode where Evans — with Holmes out of the room — demands payment for the documentary, and producers at A24 concede. Seyfried and Fielder are determined to get to what Holmes knew and when, culminating in an unfilmed encounter between Fielder and Holmes at the prison, which Seyfried acts out. Because of the time pressure, Fielder and his crew started shooting the film before there was any agreement in place. During the (off-camera) bargaining over the contract, that gave Holmes and Evans leverage to play hardball. In the reenactment of that bargaining session, Seyfried’s Holmes leaves the room; while she’s gone, an actor playing Evans asks for a cut of the documentary’s profits. The film cuts back and forth between Fielder and Seyfried’s discussion of the interaction and Seyfried’s reenactment. Did Holmes know, and deliberately step away so that Evans could ask? Or is she being taken advantage of by yet another would-be Svengali? Fielder travels to the prison, where he has an ambiguous conversation with Holmes — or at least, one that is ambiguous in his recollection. As he is telling Seyfried about it, effectively doing a table read for the scene, Seyfried immediately asks Fielder if he is protecting Holmes, if he is leaving something out. Fielder’s reply is vague. Evans at times appears unstable, especially near the end of the documentary. When he meets Seyfried, he tells her she isn’t good at social media because she made some comments around Charlie Kirk’s death — comments I had no idea she’d made because I don’t monitor Seyfried as closely as Evans apparently does. He goes on an aggressive, paranoid rant, saying that he is always armed, and that no one would like his politics. Perhaps Evans was sober as a judge, but the constant sniffing, the aggression, and the paranoia sure reminded me of conversations I’ve had with people who were fully zooted on cocaine. It is this version of Evans that claims Holmes doesn’t know he asked for a cut of the documentary proceeds. This is also when Evans says he just consults his head-Holmes to know what she would want — that the real Holmes doesn’t enter the loop. In order to operate as Holmes did at Theranos — outsourcing any conflict to a man nearby who can handle it for you — she has to make some sacrifices. Most people who are well balanced don’t want to be a human shield. This limits Holmes’ selection; the men who want to get in fights for her are men who want to get in fights, period. The men who are most likely to want to “protect” her are the ones who also will want to control her. That was the alleged downside of her arrangement with Balwani and it appears to be the downside of her relationship with Evans, too. It is also the downside of her relationship with Fielder, who has produced a documentary in which his team has the final cut. The people who will assent to being used are also the people who are likeliest to turn around and use Holmes herself. Fielder goes to the prison to talk to Holmes about whether she knew she’d get money from the film; given her history with Balwani, I assumed she’d been fully briefed by Evans about what to expect. So when she claims to have a head-Evans who talks to her so she doesn’t have to consult the real thing, I was not especially surprised. That Fielder was alarmed enough about her relationship to try to get her alone suggested to her that she needed to do some image control. The film’s post-script text reveals Evans gave up his financial stake in the documentary. The documentary itself was meant as image rehabilitation, and so the conflict of interest and its appearance in the documentary itself undercut Holmes’ image. In the end, the question Fielder is most hung up on is: Does Holmes believe everything she says? I don’t think this matters much. The film gives you the disorienting, claustrophobic experience of trying to deal with Holmes in real time, which is part of its pleasure. Holmes is a specific example, but what troubles Fielder throughout the film is part of the problem of having any relationship at all. In reality, most of the time, you cannot pause and consult written evidence, because federal prosecutors haven’t read our emails and text messages in open court. You just have to decide whether you are willing to trust someone. Exactly how far was Fielder taken in? We see the “you got this” goodbye from her as she leaves for prison. We get a reenacted scene of Holmes comforting Fielder about a breakup over the phone from prison, and a reenacted prison hug. Early in the documentary, Holmes invites Fielder for a swim in the ocean, and he says he doesn’t like cold water, and he’s not sure what breaking that boundary would mean. At the end of the film, after Seyfried asks Fielder if he is protecting Holmes, we see footage of the two of them playing in the ocean. On the one hand, it sure looks like Fielder got got. On the other hand, it’s a deliberate choice to include those scenes in that order, and it is part of what elevates the film into high art. Either Fielder is manipulating Holmes and the viewers to suggest he’s more malleable than he actually is, or Oppenheim and Fielder are including footage showing that Fielder was successfully manipulated. For the film’s directors, I have no written evidence to go to. Your guess is as good as mine.