A note on spoilers: This review will discuss many plot points of the new documentary You Can See Everything. It contains some spoilers, but we’ve redacted one of the film’s major surprises and are flagging another with an italicized editor’s note before the paragraph in question.
One of the most revealing exchanges in You Can See Everything centers on a single word.
Nathan Fielder, the film’s co-director, confronts Elizabeth Holmes about an untrue claim she made while CEO of Theranos, when she said that her company’s devices “can run any test.” Holmes defends herself by explaining that she meant “can” in the sense of future possibility: The machine was a platform for conducting many kinds of tests from a single drop of blood, so if chemistry research advanced and new tests became available, the machine could theoretically run the entire range of standard diagnostic tests, which typically require a full blood draw.
But this isn’t what the word “can” means, which is why I had to use the word “could” when describing what Holmes claimed to have meant. The tests weren’t compatible with Theranos’ system, so the machine couldn’t run them.
Fielder relays this obvious response: Almost anyone who heard the sentence “these machines can run any test” would believe that Holmes was describing current capabilities, not a hypothetical future. Holmes seems baffled and distressed by this idea.
The scene leaves many viewers walking away unsure what to think about Holmes. Here, in a nutshell, is the question that drives the entire film: You can trust Elizabeth Holmes. But should you?
The film opens about a month before Holmes is set to report to prison to begin serving an 11-year sentence1 for defrauding Theranos investors. She and her partner, Billy Evans, have invited a documentary crew into their home to capture her final days with her family. Holmes even invites Fielder to live in her house, promising him “you can totally see everything” and assuring him that they have nothing to hide.
You Can See Everything is about the question of Holmes’ guilt or innocence. It’s about the uneasy relationship between understanding someone and believing them. It’s also a movie about the importance of controlling your own narrative, especially when your life is collapsing around you.
But most importantly, this is a movie about how manipulation works. Truth, in the abstract, can be a mysterious, hard-to-define concept. But the most important lesson you can take away from You Can See Everything isn’t about the nature of truth. It’s that knowing the truth — and we very much know the truth about Holmes, thanks to an extensive legal and media record — does not make you immune to manipulation. No matter how objective you think you are, you can still fall victim to a magnetic personality.
Getting too close to a subject, in other words, can obscure the facts that are most important to understanding it. The truth is often more obvious than it seems.
We already know who’s on first
The single most important factor distinguishing those who are destroyed by scandals from those who survive them intact is the ability to control one’s own narrative. Can you persuade people to define you on your preferred terms? Or do you permanently become a monster, or worse, a punchline in the public’s consciousness?
Everyone in this movie is trying to tell a story about Holmes. There is the story told by Holmes and her partner, Evans, in which she is an honest but misunderstood visionary. There is the mainstream media’s story, in which she is a brazen fraudster. There is [redacted]’s story. And there is Fielder’s story, which becomes difficult to disentangle from the others.
Holmes, throughout the movie, is desperate for people to believe her preferred narrative. In Holmes and Evans’ telling, Holmes is an odd but idealistic person who communicates in ways that other people misunderstand. She wanted to change the world with revolutionary new ideas. She was taken advantage of by a much older man, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former partner in both business and romance. She never intended to deceive anyone, and she never committed any crimes.
The film deliberately toys with your expectations. It introduces a number of questions without holding your hand or guiding you to a predetermined conclusion. Is Evans controlling Holmes and taking advantage of her, or is Holmes manipulating Evans for his family’s money? Are we watching a deeply dysfunctional partnership, or are we mistaking a loving but unconventional relationship for something sinister? Has Fielder become sympathetic to Holmes because he understands her or because she has successfully worked her manipulative charm on him? How much confidence should we have in the film’s presentation of any of this?
Even the smaller questions become disorienting. Does Holmes really not understand the comedy routine “Who’s on First?” Does she really believe, as she claims at one point, that she can’t ever remember telling a lie? Is her apparent naïveté authentic, staged, or something that she’s performed for so long that the distinction has ceased to matter? Is this whole project — the invitation to film her final days before prison — a part of some scheme?
There’s a temptation to let all these questions dissolve into a cloud of postmodernism. I overheard several moviegoers walking out of my theater, debating whether anyone could be sure if Holmes is actually guilty. More sophisticated critics suggest that this is a film about the concept of truth, perception, and whether you can ever really know another person — and that focusing on the details of Holmes’ guilt or innocence is beside the point.
That more sophisticated take is wrong, or at least incomplete. The facts that establish Holmes’ guilt do actually matter.
And the facts, of course, demonstrate that Holmes is a pathological liar.
Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, use extreme close-ups and extended shots as though trying to read truth and fiction from each person’s micro-expressions. But you don’t need facial tics to know that Holmes is a liar. There’s an extensive record proving that she is.
Holmes has publicly admitted to forging documents she showed to investors. Former Theranos staffers report that Holmes would pretend to be out of office to duck meetings when she was at her desk a few feet away. Contemporaneous reports described the company as operating based on lies and fear.
Holmes lied to investors about military work, saying that “we have also been doing a lot of work for special operations command in the context of missions in remote areas” when the company had never deployed a Theranos machine in any situation like that. To deceive visitors into thinking that Theranos’ machines worked, it used a special demo app that hid errors while the tests were actually completed by another company’s products in a different lab.
Aside from Holmes’ record at Theranos, the film also captures a smaller, almost compulsive-seeming refusal on both Holmes’ and Evans’ part to concede ground on any subject. Evans insists that the pair never fight and, when prodded, shifts to saying that Holmes has never once been frustrated with him. Even when offered the opportunity to qualify this claim to make it sound more believable, he doubles down.
At one point, Holmes claims that she cannot remember a time when she lied, not even a white lie. Fielder can’t help himself and exclaims, “Liz, what?” But Holmes continues to insist she has never lied, reluctantly ceding ground only when Fielder starts raising specific examples of white lies.
I can only explain it as pathological, and it feels distinctly Trumpian.
I don’t know, can you?
All of this brings us back to the infamous “can.” Holmes, during this scene, expresses confusion that anyone could have misinterpreted her words. She’s distraught that anyone thought she lied, and when Fielder patiently explains how a regular person would understand the phrase “can run any test,” she reacts with befuddlement, as though this is the first time she has ever had to consider the alternative meanings of the word “can.”
But this is a ridiculous lie! This exact point about her deceptive wording and whether it meant future or present capabilities was extensively litigated during her trial. She has obviously heard this argument before. Numerous times! At length!
(Editor’s note: Spoiler incoming) This context is crucial to understanding the film’s larger themes. Holmes is, at all times, calculating and manipulating. In one moment, we learn that Evans negotiated with the documentary’s producers for a cut of the film’s profits, and it’s unclear whether he went behind Holmes’ back to do so.
When Fielder asks her whether or not she knew, you’d expect her to say “yes, I knew about that” or “no, what profits, what are you talking about?” Instead, she gives a complete non-answer: “That’s not my world.” She was the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company — how is a monetary deal “not her world”?
Similarly, when asked a very simple yes-or-no question about whether she knew a certain individual would be present, Holmes’ response is “I don’t know if I knew.” It seems obvious to me that the language is slippery on purpose; what’s actually happening is that Holmes isn’t sure which answer makes her look better, so she refuses to commit.
On the surface, the film is about interrogating Holmes’ guilt. One level deeper, it’s about whether we can really trust that we know the truth. But go one level past that, and you realize the truth is easily discoverable for anyone willing to do a few internet searches. And this is what makes the film truly interesting.
Fielder, at various points, seems to rise to Holmes’ defense. Several times, he states variations on the same idea — that, in the moment, she seems to be authentic and trustworthy, and you want to believe her. During the movie’s press tour, Fielder described Holmes as seeming very genuine and said that her magnetism would often leave the directors befuddled:
“It wasn’t until we started shooting that moments would happen — some of them are in the film — and then after Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there,” Fielder said. “We’d completely disagree on what something meant to us and what we thought was happening. Then we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting. If we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”
The film toys with the idea that Fielder has become entrapped in Holmes’ charismatic web. It drops numerous clues that Fielder is entranced by Holmes, with [redacted] even calling him out directly, questioning whether not he’s deliberately taking it easy on Holmes because he sympathizes with her.
That, ultimately, is what I take away from You Can See Everything. Master manipulators are dangerously good at what they do, even when you know they’re manipulators. And even though I knew better, I found myself somewhat unsure of Holmes’ culpability when I walked out of the theater.
Deeply charismatic people have a reality distortion field, and however smart you may be, you are not immune to it.
There’s so much more depth to You Can See Everything than I can accurately capture in this short review. It’s a deeply funny movie, even when (and perhaps especially when) its subjects don’t intend it to be. Holmes has the ability to hold uncomfortable eye contact for absolutely absurd amounts of time. One individual sniffs so loudly and so frequently that you think they must be on drugs. There is the gigantic reveal of [redacted], one of the best directorial choices of the year. It’s not overly prurient, but there are some weird sex moments. And, for some reason, a very substantial lizard?
You Can See Everything is worth your time, and I highly recommend you go experience it for yourself. This is a phenomenal film, one that will make you think for hours after it’s done and inevitably find itself on nearly every year-end “best of” list.
And if you’re not sure whether you’ve been manipulated after watching it, well, that’s rather the point.
Recommended reading:
Why Americans think other Americans are bad people
The people blaming immigration and multiculturalism for the trust crisis have the story almost exactly backward.
You can save your own brain if you want to
For most of my life, I didn’t really understand addiction. Then in 2020, stuck inside during the pandemic, I downloaded TikTok.
It has since been reduced to 10 years.
Not considered in this essay is mental illness. Holmes was raped in college and then dropped out a few months later. (Notably, while awaiting prison, she worked for a rape crisis hotline.) After dropping out of college, she takes up with two men in succession who seem to be abusers, both obsessed with weapons (guns, swords). Her goal in life is now to heal the sick. One interpretation is that as a psychologic defense strategy she has split her personality into the good Holmes (who never lies, only wants to make the world better, etc) and the bad Holmes, which she projects onto / are reflected by Sunny and Billy and reflect her anger, aggression, etc. The lies she tells are so transparently obvious (as described by all reviewers) that they cannot be considered the product of a master manipulator. And a master manipulator wouldn't give away power of attorney, or fail to cash in some of her stock. She lives in a fantasy world, where even on being confronted with reality, she never learns from it. That is why it didn't matter to her that the Edison machine didn't work. This is still consistent with her role as CEO, where her horrible actions served to protect that fantasy. It is hard to conceive that the Holmes we see was able to get into Stanford. Rather than focus on her state of mind currently, it would be important to get a sense of her when she was first at college.