Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes was due to report to a detention facility in Bryan, Texas, to begin serving her 11-year, 3-month prison sentence in the Theranos case, she and her partner, Billy Evans, invited filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to document their lives. What began as a project intended to last a few weeks stretched over approximately three years. Holmes and Evans initially hoped to find a way to regain control of the narrative amid the media storm surrounding her trial, but You Can See Everything eventually takes on a life of its own. What begins as an intensely intimate portrait evolves into a profound study of human nature and a cinematic experience that challenges the boundaries of reality.

What the world knows about Elizabeth Holmes comes filtered through public scrutiny, investigative journalism, the details of her trial, and her exploits in Silicon Valley. But her story has also been explored through television fiction. In 2022, just months before her conviction was confirmed, Hulu premiered The Dropout, a television series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes in a fictionalized account of her rise and fall. You Can See Everything takes a rawer approach, drawing us into the everyday life of Holmes and her family in an attempt to hear firsthand an account that has been told by many, but rarely by its central figure herself.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s experiment becomes a fascinating work of cinema. Their subject possesses an extraordinary magnetism: all it takes is a static shot of that blue-eyed face to captivate us, intimidate us, make us doubt, and leave us bewildered. You Can See Everything needs neither sophisticated technical flourishes nor narrative devices to reinforce its ideas. Simply listening to Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans draws us into an uncanny world, as though we had crossed into a parallel universe. It becomes almost impossible to distinguish truth from lies. The boundaries of documentary filmmaking begin to dissolve, and at times we feel that Fielder has lost control of his own film. We watch him follow Holmes like the rats trailing the Pied Piper of Hamelin, mesmerized and unable to tell whether he is the one leading the way or the one being led.

You Can See Everything runs close to three hours, yet not a minute feels unnecessary. By the time the end credits roll, we want more. The editing by Adam Locke-Norton, a frequent collaborator of Fielder’s, and the score by Ari Balouzian (Some Kind of Heaven, Primetime) give the film the pulse of a genre picture. At times, it feels like a detective thriller or a classic mystery. The reenactments of events the filmmakers were unable to capture, realized through fictional techniques, become an integral part of the film’s language and help sustain its narrative.

Ultimately, You Can See Everything becomes a monster with a life and mind of its own. Neither Holmes nor Evans manages to control their story, and at times it seems that Fielder and Oppenheim have lost control of theirs as well. We are left with more questions than answers. The documentary overwhelms us as we struggle to make sense of characters who seem too strange to be real yet are undeniably flesh and blood. As the image finally fades to black, we are left with the unsettling emptiness of being unable to reach a verdict.