Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes doc is making audiences feel sorry for Elizabeth Holmes

The facts first: You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, hit US theaters on October 16 with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95 on Metacritic. It runs 174 minutes, and its premise sounds like a prank: 34 days before reporting to federal prison for defrauding Theranos investors, Elizabeth Holmes invited a film crew to move in with her, her partner Billy Evans, and their kids.

Holmes wanted someone to document her life, and Fielder and Oppenheim heard about it through a friend. Fielder had read Bad Blood and considered the story fully covered — what pulled him in was Holmes' own perspective after she vanished from public view. A24 gave the project no deadline and no obligation to ever become a film, and the shoot ended up spanning more than three years.

The movie premiered as a secret screening at Telluride on September 6, where attendees had to surrender their phones and didn't know what they were about to watch. Variety's Owen Gleiberman called the result "a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus."

The reaction A24 couldn't have scripted

Early audience threads keep circling one feeling, and it isn't outrage:

"I genuinely left feeling a little more empathetic for Holmes after this. She's not innocent… but it's pretty evident she's been surrounded by f—king blood sucking leeches her whole life."

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

Hold that against the record. Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors, sentenced to over 11 years, and the "34 days" of the title were the countdown to her report date in May 2023. A film about a convicted fraudster, made with her full cooperation, is sending people home sympathetic to her — and critics home unanimous.

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My read on how that happened: Fielder ran the Holmes playbook on her audience. Theranos worked because Holmes could make smart people believe a story against the available evidence; You Can See Everything makes audiences feel for a person whose guilt they walked in certain of. The director even put himself on screen to do it — he'd planned to stay behind the camera, until his interactions with Holmes and Evans got strange enough that the film needed them.

Holmes let cameras in to show she had nothing to hide. The movie is called You Can See Everything, and it runs just under three hours.

The Oscar case

Documentary Feature is the obvious lane, and the profile fits: a secret Telluride premiere, perfect scores, a subject no other filmmaker could get, and A24 running the campaign. One fan has already skipped to the end of that logic, in a comment built on the joke Fielder has been telling about himself since Nathan for You's opening credits:

"Nathan is about to win his first Oscar, f—king wild and so happy for him, especially for a kid who graduated from one of Canada's top business schools, with really good grades."

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

I'm with them on the prediction. Fielder has spent four shows blurring the line between documentary and manipulation, and the Academy has never had to decide what to do with him; a movie this reviewed, about a story this famous, forces the question in the one category where he qualifies. The business-school kid's first Oscar would come from a film about the decade's most famous business fraud, and awards voters have never been able to resist a story that tidy.

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