You Can See Everything: Everything to Know About Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Documentary

What is You Can See Everything?

You Can See Everything is a documentary, but it is worth saying up front that it is almost certainly not the kind of documentary most people picture when they hear "Elizabeth Holmes film." It is not a courtroom procedural, it is not a tidy rise-and-fall business story, and it is not a series of talking heads explaining what went wrong in a Palo Alto lab. It is, by all accounts, a film about being in a room with a person who has been described, judged and dramatized by the entire world, and trying to figure out what is real.

A24's official synopsis sets it up in a single line: thirty-four days before she is sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. From there, according to the distributor, the project grows into something longer and larger, an examination that spans three years. The New York Film Festival's programmers describe it as a portrait of Holmes and her partner, William "Billy" Evans, and frame the central question as whether Holmes is being truthful about her claims of innocence, while also noting that the film deliberately blurs the lines between documentary objectivity and fiction. The festival's announcement, as reported by Next Best Picture, called it "a fascinating portrait of a relationship."

That word, relationship, is doing a lot of work. The early reviews make clear that the film is as interested in Evans, in the family's domestic life, and in the dynamic between the filmmakers and their subjects as it is in the fraud itself. It is also, crucially, a film that seems to know it is being watched. Holmes has spent years as a figure whose public persona was the story, and Nathan Fielder has spent his entire career building work around the gap between who people are and who they perform being. Put those two things in the same house and you get something much weirder and more layered than a conventional true-crime documentary.

The runtime is 174 minutes, which Wikipedia lists and several reviews confirm, so this is a genuine three-hour sit. It is shot, according to Iowa Public Radio's review, in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, which is an early sign that the filmmakers were thinking about the look and texture of the thing as carefully as the content.

How did Nathan Fielder end up living with Elizabeth Holmes?

The origin story, as reported, is almost as unusual as the film. According to the film's Wikipedia entry, which draws on the filmmakers' public comments, Oppenheim and Fielder reached out to Holmes after learning through an intermediary that she wanted her story documented. Fielder had read John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, the definitive reported book on Theranos, but he found himself curious about something the book, by design, could not provide: Holmes's own perspective from the inside.

Holmes, for her part, gave the crew extensive access. Engadget, summarizing reporting from The New York Times, notes that she granted the filmmakers that access in an effort to clear her name. That is an important piece of context for anyone going into the film. This was not a situation where a documentarian forced his way into a reluctant subject's life. Holmes chose to open her door, and she chose to do it during what was, by any measure, one of the most intense stretches of her life: the final weeks before she began serving a federal prison sentence.

The crew lived with Holmes and Evans for 34 days before she reported to prison. AwardsWatch's review specifies that Fielder stayed in the family's guest house, and RogerEbert.com's review places the home in San Diego near the beach. According to Wikipedia's production summary, A24 allowed the production to run open-ended, without a hard deadline, which is part of why the project was able to keep going long after Holmes's prison report date.

One of the most interesting production details is that Fielder did not originally intend to be on camera. Per Wikipedia's account of the production, he planned to stay behind the lens, but strange interactions during the shoot pushed him into the frame as an on-screen interviewer. That is a very Fielder development. Almost everything he has made starts with a plan and ends with the plan collapsing into something more personal and more revealing than anyone intended, often including him.

The filmmakers also tried to involve other people from Holmes's orbit. Wikipedia notes that those attempts failed. That matters because it means the film does not attempt the kind of multi-voice reconstruction that The Inventor did. It stays, for long stretches, inside the house.

The project also stayed secret for a remarkably long time. Iowa Public Radio describes it as being in production for more than three years without public knowledge, and several outlets have noted that nobody outside the production seemed to know it existed until it surfaced at Telluride. For a filmmaker as closely watched as Fielder, and a subject as heavily covered as Holmes, that kind of secrecy is its own small achievement.

When does You Can See Everything come out, and where can I watch it?

Here is the full release timeline as it stands on September 24, 2026.

The film premiered on September 6, 2026 at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, in one of the festival's unannounced "TBA" slots. The Playlist's Gregory Ellwood described it as a secret Sunday night screening that quickly became the talk of the festival.

It is next scheduled to screen at the 64th New York Film Festival as part of the Spotlight section, on September 30, 2026 at Alice Tully Hall, with both Fielder and Oppenheim in attendance, according to Film at Lincoln Center. The festival itself runs from September 25 through October 12.

The theatrical release from A24 is set for October 16, 2026. As of this writing, it is a theatrical release, and A24 has not announced a streaming date. A24 films in the United States have often landed on streaming or digital rental a couple of months after their theatrical run, but there is no confirmed date or platform for this one, so treat any specific streaming claims you see online with caution until A24 announces something official.

The production companies credited are A24, To Be Formed and Blow Out Productions, and A24 is also the distributor. The producers listed on Wikipedia are Fielder, Oppenheim, Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose and Jack Davis. The film was shot by cinematographer David Bolen, edited by Adam Locke-Norton, and scored by Ari Balouzian.

If you are in the US, UK or Canada and wondering whether you will be able to see it in cinemas, the honest answer right now is to watch A24's official channels and your local cinema listings in the first half of October. A24 has only confirmed the October 16 date publicly, and international rollout details have not been widely reported yet.

What does the trailer actually show?

The full trailer dropped on the morning of Wednesday, September 23, 2026, following an earlier teaser, and it is a very good piece of marketing precisely because it does not try to explain the film. Variety's headline summed up the three main beats: Fielder lives with Elizabeth Holmes, makes her cry, and interrogates her husband.

According to TheWrap, the trailer includes a direct exchange in which Fielder asks Holmes, "You really feel you did nothing wrong?" and Holmes answers, "I did not." It is a short moment, but it establishes the film's central tension immediately. Holmes was convicted by a federal jury in 2022, and the film is putting her own account of herself in the frame alongside that record, without the trailer telling you how to feel about it.

There is also a more vulnerable moment, reported by TheWrap, in which Holmes says, "It took me a really long time to be okay with, um... with letting someone see me cry." In the context of a trailer for a Nathan Fielder film, a line like that lands in two directions at once. It reads as a sincere confession, and it also raises the very question the whole film seems built around: in a situation where the camera is always on and the subject has a lifetime of practice managing her image, what does sincerity even look like?

Billy Evans features heavily. TheWrap notes that Evans describes falling in love with Holmes from their first conversation. Just Jared reports another exchange in which Fielder asks Evans, "Isn't your family rich?" and Evans replies, "Yeah, I think there's like a lot of different levels of wealth." That is classic Fielder: a blunt, slightly awkward question asked in a flat voice, followed by a pause that tells you as much as the answer.

Forbes notes that the trailer includes pull quotes from critics who saw the film at Telluride, which is a sign of how confident A24 is in the reviews. Forbes also points out that critics have been recommending audiences go in knowing as little as possible.

One more trailer-adjacent detail worth knowing: according to Engadget, Holmes, who has been an active poster on X, shared the trailer on her own account with the line, "I'm always being real." Whatever you make of that, it tells you she is aware of the film and engaging with its release publicly.

What the trailer does not show is almost more interesting than what it does. It gives you very little of the film's second half, which reviewers have been careful not to spoil. It does not lay out the Theranos story. And it does not tell you what Fielder concluded, because, if his own comments are anything to go by, he may not have concluded anything neat at all.

What have critics said so far?

The early reaction out of Telluride has been, frankly, about as strong as a documentary can get. Rotten Tomatoes published a first-reviews roundup on September 11, 2026 with the film sitting at 100 percent. At the time of writing, Wikipedia lists a Metacritic score of 95, indicating universal acclaim, based on early reviews. Those numbers will move as more critics weigh in closer to release, but the direction is clear.

Here is a sample of what critics said, as collected in Rotten Tomatoes' roundup.

Owen Gleiberman at Variety called it "a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus made with true inquiry." Tomris Laffly at RogerEbert.com described it as "a triumphant, riveting, and continually shape-shifting piece of creative non-fiction with curiosity and playful humor," and gave it three and a half stars out of four. Gregory Ellwood at The Playlist wrote that "Fielder and Oppenheim have crafted a remarkable and at times brilliant piece of filmmaking." Pete Hammond at Deadline said the directors "manage to find an astonishingly clever second act that we won't spoil here." Cortlyn Kelly at IndieWire wrote that "almost immediately, it's evident that You Can See Everything pushes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking." Joey Magidson at Awards Radar went even further, calling it "arguably one of the most stunning documentaries ever made."

Not every review is pure celebration, and the more thoughtful ones are worth paying attention to. J. Don Birnam at Next Best Picture called it "a troubling and undeniably gripping work of contradictions." Angie Han at The Hollywood Reporter framed it around the question of truth, writing that "what it aims for, instead, is a kind of authenticity... it asks what 'accuracy' would even look like." Jay Ledbetter at AwardsWatch, who gave it an A, made the most practical point of all: "More than anything, You Can See Everything is a film that should be recommended without being spoiled."

Laffly's RogerEbert.com review has a line that I think gets at why this film is generating such heat: she writes that it "sits at the intersection of documentary, narrative, comedy, reality TV and performance," and suggests it "might advance a new cinematic language in the mainstream non-fiction sphere." That is a big claim, and it is the kind of claim that tends to follow Fielder's work around.

Fielder himself seems as unsettled by the result as anyone. At Telluride, according to TheWrap, he said he was "struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced" while making it. Coming from the person who co-directed and appears in the film, that is both a great piece of promotional intrigue and, knowing Fielder, probably just true.

Who is Lance Oppenheim, and why does the co-director matter?

It would be easy to write about this film as "the Nathan Fielder Elizabeth Holmes documentary" and leave it there, and a lot of the coverage does. But it is a co-directed film, and Lance Oppenheim's involvement is a big part of why it looks and feels the way it apparently does.

Oppenheim, born in 1996 in Hollywood, Florida, studied visual and environmental studies at Harvard, where he learned under documentarians including Ross McElwee and Robb Moss. He made a run of short documentaries for The New York Times' Op-Docs series, including The Happiest Guy in the World, about a man who lives on cruise ships. His first feature, Some Kind of Heaven, premiered at Sundance in 2020. It is a documentary about The Villages, the enormous Florida retirement community, and it was produced with Darren Aronofsky and The New York Times. He followed it with Spermworld in 2024, about unregulated sperm donation, and the HBO docuseries Ren Faire, also in 2024, about the Texas Renaissance Festival. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2023. His next project, Primetime, is a narrative feature starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen.

What ties Oppenheim's work together is a very specific visual sensibility. His documentaries are unusually composed and cinematic. They look staged even when they are not, and that visual polish creates an uncanny effect where real people start to look like characters in a movie about their own lives. Ren Faire in particular plays less like a festival documentary than like a prestige drama that happens to be true.

Reviewers have singled out exactly that quality here. AwardsWatch describes the film's look as "painterly." Iowa Public Radio's reviewer wrote that Oppenheim's visuals help create a documentary that "looks more like a movie than real life." In a film about a subject whose entire public story revolves around the gap between image and reality, that is not a cosmetic choice. It is the argument.

The pairing makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Fielder brings the social experiment, the awkward interrogation, the constant awareness of performance. Oppenheim brings the frame, the composure, and a gift for finding the melancholy in the absurd. You can imagine each of them making a good film about Holmes on their own. Together, based on the reviews, they seem to have made something neither would have made alone.

What is Nathan Fielder's style, and where did it come from?

If you only know Nathan Fielder from a viral clip or two, it is worth understanding how his work has evolved, because every stage of that evolution feeds directly into this film.

Fielder was born in Vancouver in 1983 and earned a commerce degree from the University of Victoria. He came up through Canadian comedy, including the Humber College comedy program in Toronto, and got his first real showcase as a correspondent on CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes in 2008 and 2009, where he ran a segment called "Nathan on Your Side." That segment was an early version of the persona he would later perfect: a deadpan, awkward, slightly too earnest consumer advocate who takes a simple premise much further than anyone expects.

Nathan for You (2013 to 2017). Fielder's breakthrough was Nathan for You on Comedy Central, which ran for four seasons and 32 episodes. The premise was that Fielder, a character based on himself, offered struggling small businesses deeply unconventional advice. In practice, it was a show about the absurd logic of commerce and about how far ordinary people would go along with a person holding a camera. Its most famous stunt, Dumb Starbucks in 2014, opened a parody coffee shop in Los Angeles that put the word "Dumb" in front of everything and claimed protection as satire. Another episode, The Movement, turned a moving company marketing idea into a fake fitness craze and a ghostwritten book.

The series finale, Finding Frances, is where Fielder's future came into focus. What starts as a comic premise about helping a man track down a lost love turns into a strange, tender meditation on loneliness, memory and the ethics of filming someone else's search for meaning. Errol Morris, one of the most important documentary filmmakers alive, called it "unfathomably great." Nathan for You earned seasons of near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores and won the Writers Guild Award for comedy/variety sketch series in 2019.

The Rehearsal (2022 and 2025). Fielder's HBO series took the core idea of Nathan for You and pushed it to its logical extreme. The show helps ordinary people rehearse difficult real-life moments, using elaborate recreated sets and hired actors to run through every possible version of a conversation before it happens. The first season, which premiered July 15, 2022, began with a man practicing a confession to a friend and spiraled into a months-long simulation of parenthood in rural Oregon, complete with child actors, and a subplot where Fielder teaches an acting class and ends up living inside his own method. The second season, which premiered April 20, 2025, turned its attention to aviation safety and cockpit communication, and famously involved a full-scale recreation of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport on a soundstage. Both seasons scored in the mid to high 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, and the show won the Independent Spirit Award for best non-scripted series.

The Rehearsal is the most direct ancestor of You Can See Everything. It is a show about the space between preparation and reality, about whether any of us are ever being authentically ourselves, and about the uncomfortable power a filmmaker holds over the people he films. AwardsWatch's review specifically cites The Rehearsal as proof that "ethical boundaries are always on the bleeding edge of a Fielder project."

The Curse (2023 to 2024). Fielder's first scripted series, co-created with Benny Safdie for Showtime, starred Fielder and Emma Stone as a newlywed couple in Española, New Mexico, making an HGTV-style home renovation show called Fliplanthropy about eco-friendly passive houses. The show, which premiered November 12, 2023 and ran for ten episodes, is a pitch-black comedy about image management, performative virtue and a relationship slowly rotting under the pressure of a camera that never stops. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus called it "a wickedly uncomfortable marriage of sensibilities." Christopher Nolan praised it publicly, comparing it to Twin Peaks and The Prisoner.

Look at those three projects together and a pattern emerges. Fielder is obsessed with performance: how people present themselves, how they want to be seen, what happens when they are filmed. He is also obsessed with his own complicity in capturing that performance. His on-screen persona is not a neutral observer. He is a participant, often a clumsy and self-implicating one. You Can See Everything, by every account, is the moment that career-long obsession meets a subject whose public life is a case study in exactly that theme.

It is also, according to Wikipedia, his feature directorial debut, which is a remarkable thing to realize given how cinematic his television work has been.

Why is Nathan Fielder such a strange fit for an Elizabeth Holmes film?

On paper, this pairing sounds almost like a bit. The comedian best known for fake coffee shops and simulated parenthood makes a three-hour documentary about one of the most infamous business frauds of the century. You could imagine it going very wrong: glib, exploitative, or so ironic that it trivializes a case that affected real investors and patients.

But the more you think about it, the more it looks like a natural fit rather than a gimmick, and the reviews suggest the filmmakers understood why.

First, the Theranos story is fundamentally a story about performance. The public record shows a company that told investors and partners its technology could do things it could not, and a jury that found its founder guilty of defrauding those investors. Holmes's public image as a visionary founder was inseparable from the company's pitch, which is why so much of the coverage, and both previous screen treatments, fixated on it. Fielder has built an entire body of work around investigating the machinery of image. That overlap is not a coincidence the film stumbled into. It seems to be the whole point.

Second, Fielder's persona is uniquely suited to a subject who is extremely practiced at controlling interviews. Holmes spent years as one of the most photographed and interviewed founders in the country, and then years more as a defendant. A traditional investigative interviewer might just bounce off that kind of practiced composure. Fielder's approach is different. He asks blunt, odd, slightly uncomfortable questions, then sits in the silence afterward. That awkwardness can crack a surface in ways a polished interviewer cannot.

Third, and this is the part the reviews find most fascinating, the power dynamic reportedly does not go the way Fielder's work usually goes. In Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, Fielder is almost always the one holding the controls, designing the scenario and setting the rules. AwardsWatch's review argues that here Fielder meets someone he "cannot understand and, thus, cannot manipulate," and describes the result as a series of "bizarre interactions" between Fielder, Holmes and Evans. AwardsWatch's headline goes so far as to frame the film as Fielder meeting his match. That reversal, the professional manipulator of situations facing a subject who is not easily steered, is exactly the kind of setup that makes for compelling cinema.

Fourth, Fielder has always been interested in the ethics of what he does, even when he pushes right up against them. A Holmes documentary made by someone who has spent a decade publicly wrestling with the question of what he owes the people he films is arguably more interesting, and potentially more responsible, than one made by someone who has never asked. The AwardsWatch review poses the question directly: "What responsibility do creatives have to depict events that actually happened as authentically as possible?" That is a question The Dropout had to answer as drama, and The Inventor answered as journalism. Fielder and Oppenheim appear to have made that question part of the film itself.

There is even a small, lovely piece of connective tissue here. Errol Morris, who praised Finding Frances as "unfathomably great," is also the filmmaker whose footage of Holmes formed part of HBO's The Inventor, since Holmes did not participate in that film directly. The documentary world around Holmes is smaller than it looks.

What actually happened at Theranos? A refresher on the public record

If you have not revisited the Theranos story in a while, here is the documented background, sticking to court records and established reporting.

Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984. She founded the company that would become Theranos in 2003, when she was 19, and dropped out of Stanford in 2004 to build it. The company, headquartered in Palo Alto, promised to transform blood testing. Its pitch was that its technology, a device eventually known as the Edison along with small sample containers called nanotainers, could run a wide range of clinical tests from just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick, faster and more cheaply than conventional labs.

The idea was enormously appealing, and Theranos raised more than $700 million from investors. At its peak, the company was valued at around $9 billion. Forbes at one point listed Holmes as a billionaire with an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion, and she was widely described as the youngest self-made female billionaire. Theranos assembled a strikingly prominent board that included former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry, Henry Kissinger and retired Admiral Gary Roughead, a board that later drew criticism for its lack of medical and scientific expertise.

The company also signed major retail partnerships. Safeway spent a reported $350 million preparing hundreds of stores for in-store clinics before walking away from the deal in 2015. Walgreens announced a partnership in September 2013 and rolled out Theranos testing in dozens of locations before ending the relationship in 2016.

The unraveling began in earnest in October 2015, when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published an investigation revealing that Theranos was running most of its tests on conventional commercial analyzers rather than its own device, and raising serious questions about the accuracy of the Edison. Former employees played a crucial role as whistleblowers, including Tyler Shultz, who was the grandson of board member George Shultz and who provided information to Carreyrou and reported concerns to state health regulators. Carreyrou later expanded his reporting into the 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, which is the same book Fielder reportedly read before approaching Holmes.

Regulators followed. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services inspected the company's Newark, California lab and found conditions that posed "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety." In 2016, Theranos voided two years of results from its Edison devices, and CMS moved to ban Holmes from operating a lab for two years. In March 2018, Holmes settled civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a $500,000 penalty, return millions of shares, and accept a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company. In June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani on wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Theranos dissolved in September 2018.

What was Elizabeth Holmes convicted of, and what was her sentence?

Holmes's criminal trial ran from August 31, 2021 until the verdict on January 3, 2022, in federal court in San Jose before U.S. District Judge Edward Davila. NPR reported that the jury deliberated for more than 50 hours over seven days.

The verdict was split. The jury found Holmes guilty on four counts: three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those guilty verdicts all related to defrauding investors, and the Justice Department noted that they involved wire transfers totaling more than $140 million. The jury acquitted her on four counts related to allegations that she had defrauded patients, and it could not reach a verdict on three additional investor-related counts.

On November 18, 2022, Judge Davila sentenced Holmes to 11 years and 3 months in federal prison. She and Balwani were later ordered to pay $452 million in restitution jointly. Balwani, tried separately, was convicted on all 12 counts against him in July 2022 and sentenced to nearly 13 years.

Holmes reported to prison on May 30, 2023, at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas. That is the date the documentary's first act counts down to: the 34 days the filmmakers spent with the family before she reported.

It is worth stating clearly, because the film apparently puts it front and center: in the trailer, Holmes tells Fielder she does not believe she did anything wrong. The jury's verdict and the sentence are the legal record. The documentary does not change that record. What it offers is a look at how the person at the center of it sees herself, filtered through two filmmakers who are, by their own descriptions, skeptical.

Who is Billy Evans, and why is he so central to the film?

William "Billy" Evans is Holmes's partner. The two married in 2019, according to TheWrap's reporting, and they have two children, born in 2021 and 2023. RogerEbert.com's review describes him as a hotel heir. Before the documentary, he was a relatively private figure who appeared in coverage mostly as a presence at Holmes's side during the trial.

In You Can See Everything, he is much more than a supporting character. The NYFF description frames the film explicitly as a portrait of Holmes and Evans together, and the trailer gives him as much screen time as it gives her. TheWrap reports that in the trailer he describes falling in love with Holmes from their very first conversation.

Several reviews indicate that the film's later sections shift further toward Evans as the story moves forward in time, which makes sense given the structure: once Holmes reports to prison, the filmmakers cannot keep filming her day to day in the same way. How the film handles that shift is one of the things critics have been most careful not to spoil, so I will not go further than that here. What I will say is that if you walk in expecting a film only about Holmes, you should be ready for a film that is at least as interested in the people around her and in the relationship at its center.

How is the film structured, and what should I know without spoilers?

Critics have been unusually disciplined about protecting this film's surprises, so here is only what is publicly established and safe to know.

The first portion of the film follows the filmmakers' stay with Holmes and Evans during the 34 days before her prison report date. This section is described as observational, cinéma vérité filmmaking, with Fielder increasingly present on camera as the interviewer. RogerEbert.com and The Playlist both describe it as the more intimate portion of the film.

After Holmes enters prison, the film changes shape. The Playlist describes a second section set roughly two years later. AwardsWatch notes that the second half leans heavily on reenactment, calling it "the essential element," and The New York Times, as summarized by Engadget, mentioned "innovative recreations." Given that the filmmakers could no longer film Holmes freely once she was incarcerated, recreation is a logical tool, and it is also the tool Fielder has spent his whole career refining on The Rehearsal.

Deadline's Pete Hammond referred to "an astonishingly clever second act," and The Playlist mentioned a major revelation involving a familiar face from Holmes's orbit that the filmmakers asked critics to keep under wraps. I have deliberately not gone hunting for what that is, and I would recommend you do the same.

The NYFF programmers' description of the film as something that "keeps changing shape and uncovering surprises" is probably the best spoiler-free guide to what the viewing experience will feel like.

How does You Can See Everything compare to The Inventor and The Dropout?

This is the question a lot of people are going to ask, because the Theranos story has already been told twice in high-profile form. The short answer is that these three projects are doing completely different jobs, and they actually work well as a set.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (HBO, 2019). Directed by Alex Gibney, The Inventor premiered at Sundance on January 24, 2019 and aired on HBO on March 18, 2019. It runs 119 minutes. It is a classic investigative documentary: interviews with whistleblowers, journalists, investors and former employees, woven together with archival footage of Holmes and Balwani making big claims about the technology. Holmes did not participate, so Gibney drew on footage shot by Errol Morris and on her many public appearances. It holds a 79 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, whose consensus notes that it "declines to outright condemn" Holmes while providing "a comprehensive overview." Gibney won the Writers Guild Award for documentary screenplay for it.

The Inventor is the best place to go if you want the facts laid out clearly: what the company claimed, what the technology actually did, who raised the alarm, and how it all came apart. Its limitation, by design, is that Holmes is always seen from the outside, in footage she controlled and presentations she staged.

The Dropout (Hulu, 2022). Created by Elizabeth Meriwether and based on the ABC News podcast hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, The Dropout premiered on Hulu on March 3, 2022 and ran for eight episodes. Amanda Seyfried played Holmes, with Naveen Andrews as Balwani. Seyfried's performance won both the Primetime Emmy for lead actress in a limited series and the Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series.

The Dropout is a scripted drama, which means it can do something neither documentary can: imagine scenes that no camera recorded, give Holmes an inner life on screen, and shape the story into a satisfying dramatic arc. It is compulsively watchable and often very funny in a dark way. The trade-off is that it is, necessarily, an interpretation, and a performance of a real person by an actor.

You Can See Everything (A24, 2026). Fielder and Oppenheim's film sits somewhere that neither of those projects could reach. Unlike The Inventor, it has Holmes on camera, in her home, talking directly to the filmmakers over an extended period. Unlike The Dropout, it is not a dramatization of events, although by all accounts it uses reenactment in its later sections and actively questions the difference between real and staged. And unlike both, it is not primarily trying to tell you what happened at Theranos. It is trying to figure out who Holmes is now, what she believes about herself, and whether it is even possible for a camera to capture that.

If The Inventor is the case file and The Dropout is the adaptation, You Can See Everything is closer to a long, uncomfortable, occasionally funny interview that keeps turning into something else. Thematically, it may also be in conversation with The Dropout specifically. Any film that examines Holmes's relationship with her own public image in 2026 is also, inevitably, examining a world in which an Emmy-winning actress has already played her.

Here is a practical way to think about which to watch. If you want to understand the fraud, start with The Inventor or Carreyrou's Bad Blood. If you want an entertaining, character-driven version of the story, watch The Dropout. If you already know the story and want something that challenges how you think about it, and about documentaries in general, You Can See Everything is the one.

Do I need to know the Theranos story before I watch?

You do not need a detailed knowledge of Theranos to follow You Can See Everything, but I think you will get more out of it with at least the basics.

The film appears to assume a baseline awareness of who Holmes is and why she is going to prison. It is not, from everything reported, a film that pauses to walk you through the Walgreens partnership or the Carreyrou investigation. Its interest is in the present tense: the weeks before prison, the relationship, the interviews, and what comes after.

If you are going in cold, I would recommend reading the two sections above on Theranos and the verdict, which cover the essentials in a few minutes. If you want more, The Inventor is two hours and gives you a thorough overview, and The Dropout is a longer but very entertaining option. Bad Blood remains the definitive written account and is a genuinely gripping read on its own terms.

The one thing I would not do is read a detailed plot breakdown of You Can See Everything itself. The Theranos history is public record. The film's structure is the thing worth protecting.

Is three hours too long for a documentary?

At 174 minutes, You Can See Everything is a serious commitment, and it is fair to ask whether a documentary about a story most people already know can justify that length.

Based on the reviews, the answer seems to be yes, with an important caveat. The length is part of the method. The first act is, by design, about spending time with people. The Variety review's description of it as a "hangout movie" is telling. Fielder's work has always relied on duration, on letting an awkward moment run on far past the point of comfort until something real or strange falls out of it. You cannot do that in 90 minutes. And because the film reportedly changes shape in its second half, the length is also doing structural work, building a first act that the second act then recontextualizes.

The caveat is that this is not a film designed for casual, half-attention viewing. If you are the kind of viewer who likes to have something on in the background, this is going to be a frustrating experience, because the pleasures are in the details: a pause, a glance, a question that lands wrong. This is one to see in a theater if you can, or at minimum to watch at home with your phone in another room.

For context, Finding Frances, the Nathan for You finale, stretched a comedy format into something much longer and more patient than a normal episode, and it remains one of the most celebrated things Fielder made before The Rehearsal. His instinct for long-form storytelling has a strong track record.

Should I avoid spoilers for You Can See Everything?

Yes, and this is one of the few films where I would say that emphatically.

Critics have been remarkably consistent on this point. Jay Ledbetter at AwardsWatch wrote that it "should be recommended without being spoiled." Deadline's Pete Hammond declined to describe the second act. The Playlist noted that the filmmakers asked critics not to reveal a major development. Forbes reported that critics have been urging audiences to go in knowing as little as possible.

My practical advice is to watch the trailer if you want to get a feel for the tone, since A24 cut it carefully to avoid the second half, then stop. Avoid Reddit threads, avoid TikTok breakdowns, and be careful with search results in the days after October 16. The structure of this film seems to be a big part of its power, and knowing what is coming would reshape the experience.

Who will want to watch You Can See Everything?

This is a film with a very clear core audience and a much wider potential audience, and it is worth being honest about both.

Nathan Fielder fans. This is the obvious one. If you have watched The Rehearsal and The Curse and wondered what Fielder would do with a feature film and a real, famous subject, this is the answer. By every account it builds directly on the ideas of his earlier work, and his on-screen presence as interviewer is a big part of the experience.

True crime and scam-culture viewers. If you watched The Dropout, listened to the podcast, and followed the trial, this will offer something none of those did: extended, direct, unscripted time with Holmes herself during the weeks before prison. Just be ready for a film that asks more questions than it answers.

Documentary lovers. Critics are positioning this as a potentially landmark work of nonfiction, one that pushes the form. If you care about documentary as an art form, the conversation around this film is going to be unavoidable for the rest of the year, and you will want to have seen it.

A24 regulars. If you reliably show up for A24's more adventurous releases, this fits that tradition very comfortably.

Viewers who like uncomfortable comedy. The NYFF programmers called it "frequently hilarious," and the trailer has that very specific Fielder rhythm of awkward questions and long silences. If The Curse's squirm-inducing humor is your thing, you will likely find plenty to enjoy.

Who might want to skip it. If you want a clear, factual retelling of the Theranos story with a firm moral verdict, this is not that film, and The Inventor will serve you better. If three hours of slow-building, ambiguous, self-referential filmmaking sounds like a chore, trust that instinct. And if you find Fielder's style of awkward comedy more stressful than funny, be aware that this film reportedly leans into that discomfort rather than away from it.

What should I watch before or after You Can See Everything?

If you want to build a mini-season around this film, here is how I would approach it.

Before, watch The Inventor for the factual foundation. It is two hours, it covers the company's rise and collapse clearly, and it will make the references in You Can See Everything land without you having to reach for your phone. If you have more time, the first few episodes of The Dropout give you a strong feel for the popular image of Holmes that the documentary is, in part, pushing against.

If you have never seen Fielder's work, the most useful primer is The Rehearsal's first season. It shows you the method, the persona and the ethical questions that You Can See Everything reportedly takes further. If you only have one evening, watch Finding Frances, the Nathan for You finale, which is the closest thing in his earlier work to a standalone documentary feature.

For Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven is an excellent entry point. It shows how he finds loneliness and longing in unlikely places and how he makes real life look almost staged.

After, if the film leaves you wanting more nonfiction that plays with the line between documentary and performance, The Curse is the obvious next step. It is scripted, but it is about a couple filming a reality show about their own lives, and after You Can See Everything, some of its scenes are likely to feel eerily familiar.

And if you just want a good movie night after three hours of intensity, that is exactly what our movie quiz at the end of this article is for.

Why is this film such a big deal right now?

Part of the heat around You Can See Everything is simple. It combines one of the most followed comedians in television with one of the most discussed business scandals of the century, and it arrived as a total surprise. Very few films get to debut without anyone knowing they exist, and even fewer do it at a festival like Telluride with a TBA slot and then walk away with near-unanimous raves.

But I think there is more to it than novelty. The Theranos story has become a kind of shorthand for a whole era of startup culture: the charismatic founder, the huge promises, the investors who wanted to believe. A film that gets inside that story from the perspective of its central figure, years after the verdict, lands at a moment when people are still very much thinking about how hype and trust work, in technology and elsewhere.

There is also growing awards chatter. The Hollywood Reporter has published an analysis on whether the film could connect with the Academy, and a debut of this kind, with this level of acclaim and a fall theatrical release from A24, is exactly the profile of a serious documentary awards contender. None of that is guaranteed, and awards talk this early should always be taken with a grain of salt. But it tells you where the industry conversation is heading.

My honest take on You Can See Everything

I want to be upfront that I have not seen the full film yet, since it does not open until October 16, so everything below is built on the trailer, the reviews out of Telluride, the reported production details, and a long history of watching everything Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have made. With that caveat stated clearly, I think this is the most interesting film of the fall, and I say that as someone who approached the premise with real skepticism.

My first instinct when I heard about it was a kind of wariness. A comedian best known for elaborate social experiments making a documentary about a convicted fraudster could easily have been either a stunt or a whitewash. It could have been so ironic and detached that it made light of a case in which real people lost real money and patients received unreliable test results. Or it could have been so eager for access that it became a platform for its subject to reshape her narrative without resistance. Both of those risks are real with any film that grants a controversial figure this much screen time.

What changed my mind was the combination of three things. The first is the way the trailer is cut. That exchange where Fielder asks, "You really feel you did nothing wrong?" and Holmes answers, "I did not," is not staged as a gotcha or a redemption. It is left sitting there, flat, for the audience to evaluate. That is exactly the right choice. It trusts viewers to hold the court record and the subject's self-image in their heads at the same time, which is what a good documentary about a real, convicted person should do.

The second is Fielder's track record with ethics. His work is often uncomfortable, and critics have fairly questioned some of his choices over the years, but he is one of very few filmmakers working today who consistently puts his own role, his own power and his own complicity on screen. AwardsWatch's point that here he faces a subject he cannot steer is, to me, the most exciting thing I have read about the film. Every Fielder project I love, from Finding Frances to the parenting storyline in The Rehearsal, gets great at the moment his plan stops working. A three-hour film built around that moment is a genuinely thrilling prospect.

The third is Oppenheim. I think he is the underrated half of this pairing, and I suspect his contribution will be what people talk about more once the film is actually out. Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Faire both have this eerie quality where real people look like actors in a beautifully lit film about their own lives. Pointing that sensibility at someone whose public story is about the gap between image and reality is almost too perfect.

What I am less sure about is how general audiences will respond to the length and the ambiguity. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, but they are festival reviews, written by people who love this kind of formal ambition. I can easily imagine a viewer who wanted a clean moral takeaway walking out of the theater frustrated, and I do not think that viewer would be wrong to feel that way. This is not a film that tells you what to think about Elizabeth Holmes. If you want that, the court record and The Inventor already exist.

I am also genuinely curious whether the film's structure will hold up on a second viewing, once the surprises are known. A lot of the praise centers on the second act's reveal and the way the film changes shape. The best films with a twist, and the best Fielder episodes, reward rewatching because the first half was doing something more than setting up a trick. Whether You Can See Everything clears that bar is something I will only know once I have seen it twice.

Here is where I land. If you care about documentary as a form, or if you have followed Fielder's work from Nathan for You through The Curse, this is essential viewing in a theater on opening weekend, before the spoilers catch up with you. If you are a true crime fan who liked The Dropout, it is very likely worth your time, as long as you go in expecting a strange, ambitious art film rather than a recap. And if three hours of ambiguity sounds like a slog, it is fine to wait for home release and decide then. Based on everything we know, this is not a comfortable film. It is, however, very likely to be one people argue about for years, and I would rather be in the room for that conversation than hear about it secondhand.

Frequently asked questions

What is You Can See Everything about? It is a documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, starting 34 days before Holmes reported to federal prison in May 2023 and continuing across roughly three years.

When is You Can See Everything released? A24 opens it in theaters on October 16, 2026. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, 2026 and screens at the New York Film Festival on September 30, 2026.

Is You Can See Everything streaming? Not yet. It is a theatrical release from A24, and no streaming date or platform has been announced as of September 24, 2026.

How long is You Can See Everything? It runs 174 minutes, just under three hours.

Did Nathan Fielder really live with Elizabeth Holmes? Yes, as reported. The crew spent 34 days with Holmes and Evans before she went to prison, and Fielder stayed in the family's guest house in San Diego.

Who directed You Can See Everything? Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. It is Fielder's feature directorial debut. Oppenheim previously made Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld and HBO's Ren Faire.

What are the reviews like? Overwhelmingly positive. Rotten Tomatoes' first-reviews roundup showed 100 percent, and Wikipedia lists a Metacritic score of 95 based on early reviews.

What was Elizabeth Holmes convicted of? In January 2022 a federal jury convicted her on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to defrauding investors. She was acquitted on four patient-related counts, and the jury could not reach a verdict on three others. She was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison.

How is it different from The Inventor and The Dropout? The Inventor is an investigative HBO documentary that Holmes did not participate in, and The Dropout is a scripted Hulu drama starring Amanda Seyfried. You Can See Everything features Holmes herself on camera and focuses on performance, truth and the documentary process rather than retelling the fraud.

Do I need to watch The Dropout or The Inventor first? No, but knowing the basics of the Theranos story helps. The Inventor is the quickest way to get the factual background.

Should I avoid spoilers? Yes. Critics have widely urged viewers to go in knowing as little as possible, especially about the film's second half.

Need a lighter pick for after a three-hour documentary?

Take our mood based quiz at https://www.suggestionlabs.com/quiz/movies and let us do the deciding for you.