Leave the double entendres to lesser artists. Just off the top of my head—which has been on the verge of explosion for several days now after seeing Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary, You Can See Everything—I’d wager that the film’s title has at least five or six meanings. Take the phrase as an engraved invitation, a road map to rubbernecking, or a black-magic incantation imbuing the viewer with a sinister form of X-ray vision. Does it read as a gesture of accusation or of absolution? Is it a warning, or a metaphor? Maybe an appreciation of how the film’s cinematographer, David Bolen, deploys long lenses and slow zooms to play with spatial planes and alter our perception of events? A linguistic trick where the “t” in Can’t is silent? Could it refer to the startling, pupil-dilating image of one of the film’s main subjects captured full-frontal and flaunting it in the shower?
No, not Elizabeth Holmes—rather, her well-sculpted partner and fiancé, luxury resort heir Billy Evans, who seems weirdly chuffed to be playing Janet Leigh for the quasi-Hitchcockian Psycho embedded at his rented beach house in Del Mar, California. “No one turns away and says, ‘it’s none of my business,’” opined the Master of Suspense circa Rear Window—a dark comedy about how we’re all Peeping Toms under the skin. Voyeurism is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s also a two-way street, and Billy’s curious, confrontational mix of exhibitionism and withholding makes him an irresistible target for surveillance. That goes double—or maybe triple—for Elizabeth, whose entreaties to the camera are even trickier to gauge. With her Disney-princess irises and beguilingly oblivious affect—the self-hypnotizing vacancy channelled so memorably by Amanda Seyfried in the fall-from-grace miniseries The Dropout—the ex-Forbes covergirl is a journalist’s dream. Or nightmare: She’s a sincere study in denial; an open book written in invisible ink.
Holmes is also the first of Fielder’s documentary subjects who’s exponentially more famous than he is (not counting corporate entities like Starbucks). The architect of Theranos’s house of cards is a genuine celebrity, as opposed to, say, a Bill Gates impersonator. The question of whether meek-shall-inherit comedians like Fielder or John Wilson are punching down at their subjects—i.e., if their solidarity with eccentrics conceals a sort of superiority—is always worth asking, as is where to place a figure like Holmes in that hierarchy. She’s a household name under a form of house arrest: What more can Nathan do to harm her reputation? Can you really exploit or demonize someone whose legacy is an illusory technocratic fantasy of personalized health care? You Can See Everything addresses these complexities head-on: We learn that the film’s star had no idea who her interlocutors were when they arrived to take their places as flies on the wall. Like your sister-in-law or most normie coworker, Elizabeth Holmes had to be shown Nathan For You bits on YouTube.
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“It’s funny that I did a show about business scams and now I’m here with you,” says Fielder early on, an implication hovering in search of a landing strip. Elizabeth isn’t about to provide it. Not because she’s offended, or skeptical, but because the concept of jokes—of setups and punch lines— seems like an alien concept. “She takes things very literally,” explains Billy, but that’s not the half of it. In a sequence that could serve as a tutorial on sketch comedy dynamics—and which is also more mortifying and uncanny than anything in Obsession—Fielder sits Elizabeth down and cues up Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s classic “Who’s on First?” routine, an all-time masterpiece of miscommunication. Hearing the skit’s dynamics deconstructed by Fielder—who’s made a career of playing an Abbott-like straight man to the weirdos of the world—is a delight even as his analysis falls on deaf ears. Elizabeth eventually laughs along, but it’s to be a good sport, and maybe to spare Nathan’s feelings. She doesn’t get it.
For his part, Billy gets Abbott and Costello; he also gets Nathan and his whole alt-comedy deal, which doesn’t mean he likes it—or him—very much. Quite the opposite, actually. The aforementioned moment when Billy—whose low, thick voice is eerily like Nathan’s—clocks that his houseguest is observing (ogling?) him through tempered glass plays like a “gotcha” in reverse. Billy’s smirk suggests that he’s watching the watchmen; his nudity means he’s calling their bluff as far as the proposed all-access mandate goes. It’s been said that every documentary shoot is contested territory. The shower sequence makes it clear that this one is also a dick-measuring contest.
You Can See Everything was filmed over a period of three years, before and during Holmes’s still-ongoing 135-month prison sentence for wire fraud and conspiracy. It was apparently instigated by Billy and Elizabeth in the hopes—quixotic or calculated, take your pick—that a behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-headlines profile with an A24 pedigree might rehabilitate their images and support their newly entwined acts of entrepreneurship. That second part is important, because of all the subplots in the film, the glimpses of their Theranos 2.0-style startup is the most discombobulating: the definition of insanity, really, except that they’re actually expecting a different outcome. The couple are seen speedrunning biology tutorials and soliciting investors along with legal advice in a fight that’s already bled their resources dry; their two children—a toddler and an infant—are perpetually underfoot. The work-life balance is stressful but also idyllic; crammed on the couch for storytime or wading together in the surf at dusk, they could be a family on vacation instead of stuck in limbo.
Occasionally, Fielder confronts Holmes with direct questions about Theranos and the false promises that precipitated her ostracization and bankruptcy; he invokes her much-publicized age-gap relationship with ex-boyfriend (and hypothetical Svengali) Sunny Balwani as if prompting her to shift the blame. Elizabeth resists accountability because she doesn’t believe that she did anything wrong. If somebody didn’t understand her—investors, journalists, investigators—it was a byproduct of miscommunication, not malice. Who’s to blame for that? Who among us hasn’t been misquoted? Who’s on first? She cannot tell a lie—little, white, or otherwise. Honest.
At this point in his career, Fielder is something like a sentient flesh-and-blood polygraph. Still, he can’t conceal his bafflement, which, within the film’s carefully maintained terrarium, becomes contagious. At times, Nathan appears legitimately confused about what he’s doing—not fake-confused as in his capacity as the omniscient protagonist, narrator, and puppet master of Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, which were narrated in first person from the far side of the curtain. The Nathan we see here is sweaty and spontaneous, working on his back foot; there’s no poker face.
Like all of Fielder’s work, You Can See Everything vibrates on a wavelength of sublime and medium-specific anxiety. Having successfully weaponized the manipulations and clichés of reality television against themselves in Nathan For You and The Rehearsal—and delivered a transcendent moment of literally elevated horror at the end of the deconstructed supernatural drama The Curse—he moves into feature-length documentary filmmaking (technically for the second time after 2017’s amazing “Finding Frances”) with prodigious and deceptive effortlessness. Prodigious, because when it comes to a few crucial aspects of non-fiction filmmaking—finding and cultivating intimacy with eccentric, compelling civilians; considering the most effective and evocative ways to wield or place a camera; consistently leveraging patience against spontaneity—Fielder seems to have emerged fully formed from one of Canada’s Top Business schools with the aesthetic equivalent of a 4.0. (Maybe he was mainlining Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris in between seminars.) Deceptive, because a big component of Fielder’s mastery is the way he gives the impression that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The surface variations he keeps wringing on his on-camera persona—consumer advocate; cultural anthropologist; surrealist stuntman—converge in their shared sense of reach exceeding grasp: of existential terror as an occupational hazard; of documentary as a spectrum of empathy, exploitation, and exposure.
That Fielder’s appearance as a deadpan nebbish-savant navigating his own booby-trapped kingdoms is still persuasive after so many years—and so many vertiginous ontological magic tricks that manage to stick the landing—suggests that he’s also, potentially, a great actor. One smart enough, for example, to let a pro like Emma Stone wipe the floor with him in The Curse in order to serve the series’ excoriating ideas about on-camera and behind-closed-doors performance.
I thought of The Curse when Billy flashed the camera, and of the line wherein Nathan’s character, Asher Siegel, is described as a “cherry tomato boy”; the pile-up of online pieces about whether Fielder’s micropenis was real tied in to the show’s not-so-veiled themes of impotence. You Can See Everything doesn’t go so quite far in literalizing beta-male fears of inadequacy, and yet the richest interpretive vein running through the film may be the one where Nathan’s dislike of Billy conveys a kind of paternal yearning. The Curse pivoted on Asher’s relationship to children: the neighborhood kid who hexes him, and the baby he hopes to have with his ambivalent influencer-wife. The first season of The Rehearsal gained emotional traction from Fielder’s desire to play house with a series of stand-in, surrogate kids; the show’s symbolic emblem of multitasking and dad envy was a Macbook in a BabyBjorn. (Season 2 found Nathan donning a diaper to pantomime infantilization.) At one point in You Can See Everything, Nathan explains that one of the reasons he was first drawn to Elizabeth—and so determined to figure out whether she was a victim, or a bullshit artist, or a sociopath, or whatever—was because she told him, during the shoot off-camera, that he looked like he might be a good father.
Billy, as we can see—even if we can’t See Everything—is a good dad: attentive, tender, and competent. In all other respects, he appears to be a monumental, dissembling, opportunistic asshole, but of course, that’s hypothetically as much a function of Fielder and Oppenheim’s structural gamesmanship as his own personality. (The moment where Evans unexpectedly professes allegiance to a certain no-longer-living political commentator is engineered as a pretty definitive Turning Point.) There are other issues to consider though, like Nathan’s shameless, and unseemly eagerness to ingratiate himself to Elizabeth. Back in the Nathan For You classic “Smokers Allowed,” Fielder illustrated how just a couple of minutes of sustained eye contact between strangers could metastasize into a simulacrum of love at first sight. In You Can See Everything, Nathan’s loneliness and unluckiness in love inches into the foreground. It contextualizes the stolen glances between himself and Elizabeth: the furtive and flirty text messages, the cozy-on-the-couch body language, a goodbye hug that lingers a beat or two too long.
It’s hardly a novel insight to point out Fielder and Oppenheim—whose self-effacement in contrast to his directorial partner is strategic—are creating and chronicling these jaw-dropping moments simultaneously. Nor is it exactly rocket science to propose that the limits and ethics of such control are as much the film’s subject as Holmes and Evans, their marriage, or their business ventures. The self-reflexive dimensions of You Can See Everything aren’t just visible—they can be seen from space. What’s genuinely tricky is talking about what happens in the film’s second half, after the Holmes household decamps from California to Texas to prepare for Elizabeth’s surrender and incarceration. Fielder and Oppenheim have pleaded with critics to forgo spoilers, which is fair enough, except that a movie as ingenious, unsettling, and expansive as this one is arguably also spoiled—in a different way—by criticism that’s forced to play things coy.
Reviewing You Can See Everything’s premiere at Telluride, Variety’s correspondent brazenly unveiled the film’s biggest surprise. All I’ll say is that viewers possessed of even cursory familiarity with Fielder’s post-Nathan For You work—i.e. anybody with a ticket who isn’t Elizabeth Holmes—could plausibly predict where, or to whom, he turns in the absence of access to his star. Luckily, knowing more or less where You Can See Everything is going doesn’t make its off-the-grid trajectory and kamikaze velocity any less white-knuckle. It’s one thing for a movie to interrogate its own operations, but Oppenheim and Fielder are so determined to play bad-cop-worse-cop with their own material—up to and including dragging A24’s executives and accounting department into the spotlight—that their ostensible exposé mutates into something more like a confessional.
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You Can See Everything is absorbing and entertaining and occasionally beautiful—the flipside to the studied ugliness of Primetime, Oppenheim’s other 2026 feature. The movies would make for an instructive double bill about the pitfalls of investigative reportage; they could also switch titles. It’s equally true to say that it’s suffocating—a torture chamber equipped with ropes for hanging and knives for twisting into the ribs.The three hours fly by, pressurized at all times by a series of insoluble dichotomies: between dominance and submission (mythologized against her will as a Girl Boss, Elizabeth talks about building “monuments of love” to Billy in a way that makes her sound like either a tradwife or a Manson Girl); between artifice and authenticity (what purpose is truly served by Billy devising a photorealistic AI avatar of Elizabeth?); between love and sacrifice (“I haven’t been laid in 900 days,” gripes our loving husband) and, above all, between guilt and complicity.
The latter tension is felt by all parties, including a couple of characters who exist at a fascinatingly mediated distance from the Holmes-Evans household. These interlopers, such as they are, deserve credit for sticking their fingers into a dirty, festering can of personal and professional worms. I’d also give one of them an Oscar for their troubles—the first such acting prize ever given out for a non-fiction film. Suffice it to say that the problem-solving savant of Nathan For You eventually rears his head here. All hail the Fielder Method—that meticulous, meretricious, and deeply malevolent process by which private conversations and exchanges are jotted down and recreated for posterity by a set of doppelgangers. We won’t know if Nathan is actually a Hitchcock fan unless he visits the Criterion Closet; I’m pretty sure, though, that, like most control-freak filmmakers obsessed with obsession, he’s seen Vertigo. The resulting mise-en-abyme is less grandiose but as densely stratified as anything in Digger; the all-the-world’s-a-stage conceit arguably works better on a small scale.
The stakes of these inevitable metafictional interludes feel surprisingly high despite—or, more likely, because of—our suspicion that everything we’re seeing (and hearing, and reading on iPhone screens) has been exquisitely fabricated for our convoluted, squirm-inducing viewing pleasure. You Can See Everything’s structure and editing remain adroit and sophisticated even as things become significantly unhinged; the juxtaposition of Nathan’s line-blurring attachment to Elizabeth, with a second, similarly precarious situationship doesn’t so much take us through the looking glass as strand us—haplessly—in a hall of mirrors. The view is dazzling and discombobulating; this is what it looks like when filmmakers reflect on their practice. Fielder and Oppenheim have bookended their film with complementary but contradictory images of entrapment: the bars of a crib replaced by the bars of a prison. In both cases, what’s being framed between the slats is ordinary but weirdly remote—the quotidian becomes a vanishing point. We’re left on the outside looking in. If one condition of a truly great film is that it forces you to pay attention—to think through what you’re watching and why; to appreciate subtleties of form and function; to practice the mental equivalent of rack focus—You Can See Everything meets the criteria. If one condition of a masterpiece is that it makes you feel like you missed something in spite of yourself—that it forces you, humbly, to accept and live with certain mysteries—it exceeds them.