Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc “You Can See Everything” Stuns Telluride

A nameless electricity ran through the Telluride Film Festival leading up to Sunday night. A big world premiere was coming, but what would the film be? By the time the line began forming outside the Werner Herzog Theater, the electricity had coalesced into eager festivalgoers, their phones secured in locked pouches as they waited patiently. Security teams stood by in night-vision goggles. The vibes were, well, interesting.

The secret screening turned out to be You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former founder of Theranos, one of the most obsessively and excessively documented scammers of the last decade. A24 confirmed the film to the world at the same time, dropping a teaser and announcing You Can See Everything‘s October release, smack dab in the middle of the Oscar-hopeful schedule. The studio clearly has major confidence in what Fielder and Oppenheim have created, given that it’s a 174-minute nonfiction release that generated real post-film chatter once the credits were rolling.

Even the brief teaser, which features Fielder and Holmes locked in a very tight two-shot, with the latter promising him that she has no reason to deceive him while, off-camera, her newborn baby can be heard making a few peeps, is the type of painfully uncomfortable standoff Fielder has made a large part of his oeuvre. The stripped-down score beneath it, and the sense that these two people are engaged in a serious mind game, gives what should otherwise be a fairly uneventful 75-second tête-à-tête an emotional, twitchy charge.

The footage was captured thirty-four days before she reported to prison. Holmes invited Fielder, Oppenheim, and their crew inside her home to capture her every move. This invitation became a three-year odyssey that A24 describes in its own marketing material as a descent “into the abyss.” The story of Holmes and Theranos has been told many times before: investigative journalist John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood,” documentarian Alex Gibney’s 2019 film The Inventor, and Elizabeth Meriwether’s Hulu series The Dropout, in which Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy for portraying Holmes. Yet A24 is confident that the way Fielder and Oppenheim approached Holmes and this material is different, and the reaction from Telluride and the reviews coming out of the festival suggest they’re onto something.

Fielder has already proven himself a unique, fearless nonfiction creator with his series The Rehearsal, which earned Peabody recognition and an Emmy nomination for writing. He paired up with Oppenheim, a seasoned director with doc experience who also has his Robert Pattinson-led film Primetime coming out (it was a smash at the Venice Film Festival). They seem to be perfectly paired to take a different approach to filming Holmes.

You Can See Everything was lensed by Oppenheim’s collaborator David Bolen—Bolen shot the director’s doc Some Kind of Heaven and Josh Margolin’s Thelma—working here in a 4:3 frame and using long zoom lenses, while takes linger uncomfortably (a Fielder specialty), which can have the effect of making casual white lies and dissembling begin to disintegrate in real-time.

Fielder and Oppenheim have made Fielder himself a part of the film (as evidenced in the teaser above), letting audiences watch him spar with Holmes and decide for themselves if he’s being lied to, and if so, whether it’s working. The tension, built up through that three-year process the filmmakers went through, leads to a final act that left festivalgoers stunned.

That’s precisely the effect you want for a documentary, especially one that A24 seems to rightfully see as a major awards player. Yet the questions You Can See Everything will raise are important for the folks who vote on doc awards. Fielder isn’t the type of filmmaker to stay on the sidelines, and since documentarians are often lauded for being earnest observers rather than participants, You Can See Everything is an unusual entrant in the field. And as with everything that Fielder seems to do, there’s the question of what precisely is real and what was scripted.

Do these questions and the very fact that viewers aren’t sure whether what they’re seeing is a performance or real life potentially hobble You Can See Everything? Or, as reviewers and A24 themselves are saying, do these elements in fact make the film a potential candidate for the Best Picture category? It would be the first time a documentary was nominated for Best Picture—and although we’ve had 17 years of the expanded Best Picture field, it still hasn’t happened. Can You Can See Everything make history?

You can decide for yourself. You Can See Everything will be seen far and wide in theaters this October.

Featured image: Elizabeth Holmes in “You Can See Everything.” Faith Potter (A24)