Elizabeth Holmes Documentary ‘You Can See Everything’ Stuns Telluride With Bizarre Inside Look

A secret documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has exploded onto the film scene after a surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, with filmmaker and comedian Nathan Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim revealing a project that was kept hidden for years.

Titled You Can See Everything, the nearly three-hour documentary was filmed largely in secret over three years and begins just 34 days before Holmes was due to report to federal prison. A24 is releasing the film theatrically in October.

The result, according to early reviews, is anything but a conventional documentary.

Nathan Fielder Gets Inside the Elizabeth Holmes Story

Nathan Fielder, known for Nathan for You, The Rehearsal and his deliberately uncomfortable approach to reality television, co-directed the documentary with Lance Oppenheim.

The filmmakers were given extraordinary access to Elizabeth Holmes, her husband Billy Evans and their young children as Holmes prepared for prison.

Rather than simply revisiting the Theranos scandal, the documentary appears to turn the camera back on the person behind one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious corporate collapses.

The film’s official synopsis describes an intimate portrait that becomes a “mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”

At Telluride Film Festival, audiences were reportedly required to lock away their phones before entering the secret screening. Festival organizers had kept the film’s identity hidden until the final moment.

‘Are You Being Real?’

You Can See Everything trailer immediately raises the question that has followed Elizabeth Holmes for years: Can she be believed?

In the trailer, Nathan Fielder directly challenges Elizabeth Holmes about whether she is being genuine. Holmes insists that she is “always being real.”

That exchange becomes particularly unsettling given Fielder’s filmmaking style and Holmes’ history of making extraordinary claims about Theranos.

Early critics say the documentary deliberately blurs reality, performance and filmmaking itself. Variety described it as far removed from a conventional documentary, while the Los Angeles Times reported that the film evolves into something involving reenactments and increasingly strange twists.

Nathan Fielder himself has admitted that even after spending years immersed in Holmes’ world, he still struggles to understand exactly what he experienced.

That uncertainty appears to be part of the movie’s point.

The Theranos Scandal That Made Holmes Famous

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and became one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated young entrepreneurs after claiming the company could perform numerous medical tests using tiny quantities of blood.

Her pitch attracted enormous attention and hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.

But Theranos eventually collapsed after investigations exposed serious problems with its technology and business practices.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors and three counts of wire fraud involving individual investors. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison.

Her former partner and Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was separately convicted and received a lengthy prison sentence.

Holmes reported to prison in 2023.

A Story Hollywood Has Already Told But Not Like This

Holmes’ downfall has already been examined through books, podcasts, documentaries and the Hulu series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried.

So why make another Elizabeth Holmes film?

That is precisely what makes You Can See Everything so intriguing.

Instead of reconstructing the Theranos story from the outside, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim obtained access to Holmes at one of the most consequential moments of her life, immediately before she entered prison.

The documentary then reportedly moves beyond those final pre-prison weeks, continuing as a three-year filmmaking experiment that increasingly questions who is controlling the narrative.

Telluride Critics Are Calling It Anything But Normal

The secret screening has already generated major buzz.

Variety called the film an unusually unconventional experience, while Deadline praised the extraordinary level of access. Other early reactions have highlighted its strange structure, psychological tension and unexpected turns.

That may make the documentary one of the year’s biggest cinematic conversation starters.

And Fielder appears determined to preserve the mystery. The filmmakers have urged audiences to experience the movie with as little prior knowledge as possible.

For a story about a woman whose entire career revolved around controlling what people believed, that may be the perfect approach.