By Jesse Dixon
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim join forces in this year’s buzziest title, documenting the 34 days before fraud-convicted Elizabeth Holmes is sent to prison for 11 years.
In the early hours of September 6th, 2026, I was seated in the Werner Herzog Theatre, the most famed cinema-watching venue participating in the 53rd Telluride Film Festival. When I walked out of the theatre after the film (the very good Tender Loving Care), a line had already started to form alongside the adjacent field. Lengthy queues were not an unusual occurrence at Telluride, except in this case, nobody knew which movie they were lining up for. The 6pm Day 3 slot at the Herzog was the festival’s annual mystery screening, a secret film that isn’t announced until everybody is already seated.
Quite the gamble. And a gamble I decided to participate in, deciding to return to the Herzog at 3pm (three hours early). At which point the line was stupidly long, and I knew my chances of getting in were extremely slim. A kind volunteer confirmed this, and I accepted defeat, deciding to see The Only Living Pickpocket in New York instead on the other side of town. The line for this film was considerably shorter, and I got to chatting with a guy who revealed that he knew what the secret film was – an unknown three-hour documentary by one Nathan Fielder. I instantly felt relieved. I wasn’t particularly fond of documentaries and at the time hadn’t seen much of Fielder’s work. We moved on to different topics, and I enjoyed the rest of my evening.
Twenty-four hours later I felt like a complete idiot. Untitled Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim Elizabeth Holmes documentary, as it was then called, was all anyone could talk about. People who saw it were telling people who didn’t how unbelievable it was, how it was unlike anything they had ever seen. Thus began an extremely long two-month wait until I was finally able to see You Can See Everything back in Australia…
It was unbelievable. It was unlike anything I have ever seen.
Note: Please do not continue reading until You Have Seen Everything.
Thirty-four days before she begins her 11-year stint in federal prison, notorious Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes invites Fielder and Oppenheim into her temporary home with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children. Her motive: to get her truth out before she no longer can, that being her complete innocence. Holmes was convicted of fraud in January 2022 after the ‘revolutionary’ blood-testing technology developed by her company failed to work as promised. Yet, as she repeatedly insists in the film, she articulated the capabilities of her invention correctly and is not to blame for its failure.
Enter Nathan Fielder. It feels as if everything he has previously worked on has led to this moment. From his experience working with failing businesses in Nathan For You to his exceptional understanding of people and how to make them reveal things in The Rehearsal, Fielder has been training for this moment for twenty years. His ultimate test. Someone who is as deceptive as he is disarming, and equally committed to the bit. Their dynamic is phenomenal to witness through the lens of Lance Oppenheim, who, at only thirty years old, is a very skilled documentarian with the likes of Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven.
Billy Evans, however, is not on Nathan and Elizabeth’s level. He is a tiny chihuahua trying to be heard among two intellectual alpha dogs. The main character syndrome is off the fucking scale. Which makes him an excellent documentary subject, and somebody Nathan and Lance realise is a very important piece of the Elizabeth Holmes puzzle. He is constantly in the way and yet you can’t take your eyes off him. There’s a memorable scene involving a bowl of eggs that Elizabeth Holmes is whisking. Billy stops talking to Nathan and takes the bowl from his partner, continuing to whisk with far more vigour. Fielder, the brilliant interrogator that he is, immediately asks him why he has done this. It’s a question you’d never expect to hear, and no one else would think of. Billy gives an awkward response, suggesting that Elizabeth’s unenthusiastic whisking leads to poor scrambled eggs. He is desperately trying to insert himself into situations, provide help, and reassure himself that he is just as smart and important as Elizabeth, and Fielder unlocks this fragility with a simple, matter-of-fact question. It’s so good that people were dressing up as the bowl of eggs for Halloween!
But as skilled as Fielder is, there is one egg he can’t quite crack. You would think one would develop a greater understanding of someone they’ve lived with for 34 days. Not when that someone is Elizabeth Holmes. In several memorable moments, including the ‘Who’s On First’ scene and a beach conversation where she tells Nathan that she has never lied ever, he appears to become even more uncertain than he already was. In fact, it appears he has begun to care for her. There’s a brilliant shot as Elizabeth is saying goodbye to Nathan, after the thirty-four days are up, where I seriously thought to myself: Are they about to kiss?
These feelings have a lot to do with the second half of You Can See Everything, where this masterpiece in documentary becomes a masterpiece of all humanity. Two years have passed, and Billy is working on what is essentially Theranos 2.0, corresponding with his jailed partner through email and weekly monitored visits. But there is now an Elizabeth Holmes-shaped hole in the film. After all, what do you do when the subject of your documentary is suddenly no longer available to be in the documentary?
You get the next best thing, which is actually a much, much, much better thing because it’s Amanda Seyfried, unapologetically awesome movie star who famously played Holmes in the 2022 Hulu series The Dropout and, as it turns out, is more than a match for Nathan Fielder. For whilst they are a team in the second half of this movie, as they pry information from Billy, work to penetrate all of Holmes’ dishonesty (or honesty??), and even recreate conversations featuring Holmes that were unable to be filmed, in which the Mamma Mia! star reprises her Emmy-winning role in a way she (or anyone else) could have never anticipated, Seyfried has noticed what the audience has noticed. The relationship between Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes is not entirely that of a documentarian and their subject. It could be something more.
Now of course, this is a Nathan Fielder project. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’s doing this on purpose, and, like Elizabeth, it’s hard to tell when the real Nathan starts. But as Fielder-heads will recognise, this is not the same Nathan that they know from television. It is impossible to argue that something about Holmes has caught him off guard; there are even situations where he loses the power to her, and she takes control. Amanda Seyfried is in the best position to understand this. She has fully embodied the Theranos founder in a past role; she has seen the footage we have seen of Nathan and Elizabeth’s interactions, and whilst playing Holmes in these unbelievable recreations, she has a first-hand experience of how Nathan behaves around her. So Amanda Seyfried directly asks Nathan Fielder if he is concealing anything because he cares for Elizabeth Holmes. Which is exactly the kind of question that he himself would ask!
We must all thank Emma Stone for introducing this pair. This is truly an incredible circumstance. The woman known for playing Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout also happens to be Nathan Fielder’s psychological equal. On top of this, she’s doing some of the best acting of the year in recreated scenes of the first Holmes/Fielder conversation, a meeting with A24 executives (also featuring Christopher Abbot as Billy), and the long-awaited prison visit that Nathan is finally able to arrange with the woman who started it all.
In this final scene, a race-against-the-clock thriller with Billy right around the corner, Fielder gets one last chance to crack the egg. He tells her all of the awful things her partner has done with her out of the picture. Using her Twitter profile to troll users. Asking for a portion of the box office without telling her. Obtaining power of attorney over her! From the audience’s point of view, he has backed her into a corner in the ultimate gotcha moment. And what is her response?
‘Ever since Billy has come into my life, I’ve become convinced that our idea of what we believe to be God is actually love’.
As I watched the credits roll, I was faced with two possibilities. Either Elizabeth Holmes is a pathological liar, knows exactly what she is doing, and is refusing to let up despite living behind bars. Or she genuinely believed that her invention would do no harm, that she explained its capabilities to the best of her ability, and that she has been heavily manipulated by her significant other for over six years. Nathan and I had seen everything, and yet we could not tell for sure.