Elizabeth Holmes invited the cameras in 34 days before prison — Nathan Fielder's A24 film is at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes
Every previous account of Theranos was assembled from the outside — court records, ex-employees, a Hulu series. This one was shot from inside the house, by a comedian who does not let people finish their own version of events, and it arrives with a perfect critics’ score.
A24 put out the full trailer on Wednesday morning, and the thing people keep re-reading is the logline. Thirty-four days before she reports to prison, Elizabeth Holmes invites a film crew she does not control to follow her everywhere. What that crew came back with, after three years, is You Can See Everything — 174 minutes, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, in cinemas 16 October.
She was convicted of defrauding Theranos investors and is serving eleven years. The film covers her last weeks outside and her first weeks inside, which is the part no previous Holmes project has had: there have been documentaries, podcasts, bestsellers and a Hulu limited series, all of them working from the outside.
What the trailer actually shows
Fielder does not do sympathy and he does not do prosecution. He sits opposite her and asks whether she feels she did anything wrong, and she says she does not. He turns to her partner and tells him, flatly, that she may have taken his money the same way she took everyone else’s. Holmes says it took her a really long time to be all right with letting anyone watch her cry, and then a single tear arrives, on camera, at exactly that moment.
From the teaser that went viral earlier this month: «I don’t have anything to deceive you on. Of course I’m not deceiving you. Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.»
That is the engine of the film and it is also Fielder’s whole career. Nathan for You ran on the gap between what people say and what they are doing; The Rehearsal ended with him apparently at the controls of a passenger jet. Handing him a subject who has spent a decade insisting she believed her own story is less a documentary assignment than a laboratory.
Where it stands before release
It premiered at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on 6 September as an unannounced screening, and the numbers since have been the kind studios do not usually get on a three-hour documentary.
- 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 10 reviews
- 95 on Metacritic from 7 reviews
- 174 minutes — longer than Oppenheimer
- Cinemas from 16 October; no streaming date announced
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus and said Fielder has the most deadpan on-screen interviewing manner since Steven Wright. Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote that it blows the lid off a story already told in several documentaries, podcasts and books, and that it does not sag across any of its 174 minutes. Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert.com put it plainly: like no other film she has experienced.
Variety’s Clayton Davis on the Telluride screening: the film keeps escalating in strangeness across its three-year span, and the words going round the gondola line afterwards were «wild» and «WTF» — both meant as compliments.
Oppenheim is the less famous name and the more conventional filmmaker of the two, and he has a second A24 title out right now: Primetime, his first narrative feature, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. Two films, one autumn, both about people being watched while they explain themselves.
Previously we wrote: Endgame Encore re-release, September 25: the Doomsday footage depends on which ticket you buy
What nobody involved has explained is why Holmes agreed. She had a fraud conviction, an eleven-year sentence and thirty-four days left, and she chose to spend them in front of a camera operated by a man whose speciality is letting people talk until the performance shows. The answer is presumably somewhere in the 174 minutes.
