Films, in many cases, can be so connected to the cultural zeitgeist that whether or not someone identifies themselves as a prolific cinephile, we can all tell when something has taken a complete shift within a genre or the world of movie-making in general. The essential birth of both the blockbuster and subgenre of shark flicks from Spielberg back in 1975, Disney reinvigorating 2D animation in the renaissance era in the 90s, Pixar evolving 3D animation in the early 2000s, even the horror genre’s many landmark hits of cultural impact throughout the past decade. In the same way that we’ve seen so many evolutions from filmmakers that changed the ways we look at movies forever in the past, You Can See Everything is a complete shift in the essence of what anyone previously thought was possible in documentaries and filmmaking in general.
The envelope has truly never been pushed harder in defining how we, as people, search for the meaning of truth and how we perceive the reality of performance, and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim manage to keep things hinging within utterly jaw dropping execution. It’s the type of cinematic experience that is nearly impossible to describe to someone else unless they’ve also seen it but will completely flip the way one sees how previous events unfold in the feature. It’s as relentlessly humorous as it is deeply uncomfortable in the questions and moral quandaries it consistently squirms around to find answers, constantly evolving and intertwining the basic lines we see in both fictional narrative and the cold hard facts. It’s never dull to watch at a single moment and will keep your eyes glued to the screen because in You Can See Everything, you see more than you can possibly imagine but always feel at arms length from a true reality in a way that’s at one with the experience of watching it unfold.
The documentary we witness begins filming back in 2023. It’s been nearly a decade since the utter fall from grace that Elizabeth Holmes’ blood testing company, Theranos, suffered after being at the center of massive fraudulence; scamming investors and medical patients across the nation. Holmes herself has already been directly indicted for fraud as well, and with her public image now irreversibly damaged, Holmes makes a decision that she thinks will showcase her and her partner, Billy Evans, in a better light to the public. The couple invites Nathan Fielder’s film crew to capture every moment of their daily lives in the thirty-four days before Holmes is sent to prison. What unravels throughout the days and the years up to present day that follow is an unruly work of docufiction that breaks the mold of what anyone could possibly imagine as the groundwork for basic documentaries or biographical work.
Throughout the first hour or so of You Can See Everything, what we follow is in line with what most would imagine from just reading the film’s baseline synopsis. Fielder and Oppenheim’s crew film every inch possible of the couple’s lives from jogs on the beach shore to intimate moments with their children all while Fielder takes a crack at the code behind the psyche of apparent ultimate manipulator that is Elizabeth Holmes.
Holmes, however, seems nearly impenetrable to the awkward conversations and unorthodox persona that’s made Fielder famous making the first section an enrapturing watch of unstoppable force meets immovable object of sorts. Once Holmes is sent to prison, however, the questions of benefits and ethical art derived from a person’s life and the work arounds for how you continue to derive intriguing material when your documentary’s main subject is absent is where things start to truly warp any sense of truth.
It was a sense of fate in retrospect that Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim decided to collaborate with each other on this project because both of what each creative is synonymous for is at the crux of why the film’s mind melding is so transfixing. Fielder’s persona within his conversational based documentary series’ like Nathan For You and The Rehearsal speaks for itself in the certain surrealist qualities he brings to many of his projects, but the touch of Oppenheim adds a heightened quality to every on and off screen interaction.
The fly on the wall and wavelength of narrative side-by-side with documentary sensibilities has always existed within Oppenheim’s work, like Spermworld, but the hallmarks really shine within this particular material. The ultra closes ups on every single person’s face leaving audience interpretation at times to lightest of facial expressions, the ever-blaring score from Ari Balouzian, and the simple sheer unpredictability that the film rides at every turn as it slowly escalates the fabric of its construction within the nearly 3 hour runtime. It’s the perfect combination of two wildly exuberant creatives that channel as many cringe-inducing guffaws as tense moments that feel like you’re in the deep abyss of a psychological thrill ride as more unfurls.
Even beyond that, throughout its entirety, You Can See Everything dissects not only every facet and dichotomy to Holmes and her relationship to Billy but also its own existence as a documentary and the responses that media of all kinds has had to Elizabeth’s public perception. Any sense of normal believability one would think to gather is thrown out the window here, and so is our interpretation of what is and isn’t the will of performance and harsh realities of the ethics behind our creation of theatrics surrounding a person’s real life in a way that will always leave you mesmerized throughout its back half.
Most of the discussions play as a true dive into the psyche of why someone so infamous could truly believe to this day they did nothing wrong but also questions the many elements surrounding the revolutions of Holmes’ life like the manipulations of her partner we witness as more revelations unravel. Watching every query and piece of transfixing absurdity commence is what makes the experience of watching the film otherworldly and by the time it wraps up, it’s difficult to think of any remote thing that’s even close to being like it.
You Can See Everything is a constantly evolving magic trick that shifts and turns in ways that will leave you forever questioning what is the reality behind many, if not all the truths and lies we tell. A constantly blurry line riding between how we view presentation, public perception, and the entirety of the documentary genre and art itself that’s just as much about the inherent manipulation of creating art as it is the titular web of deceivers at its center. A constantly riveting and transformative piece of art from two of our greatest documentarians, You Can See Everything will go down as possibly the best documentary ever made and a complete rewiring of the code of what one can be through sheer unbelievable brilliance.
