You Can See Everything documentary: is Elizabeth Holmes playing Nathan Fielder, or is he playing her?

You Can See Everything is Fielder's first feature, co-directed with documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. A24 premiered it as a secret screening at Telluride on September 6, where the audience didn't know what they were about to see and had to hand over their phones, and released it in theaters on October 16. It runs 174 minutes.

The setup is simple. Holmes, the founder of the collapsed blood-testing company Theranos, and her partner Billy Evans let a film crew live with them and their children for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison for defrauding investors. The filmmakers ended up following the couple for about three years.

How Fielder ended up on camera

He wasn't supposed to be. Fielder planned to stay behind the camera, but his conversations with Holmes and Evans got so strange that the directors kept them in. The other obvious interview subjects weren't an option. As Fielder put it, "people from the past were just sort of done with her."

So the film becomes the two of them. Early on, Fielder, best known for Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, makes the obvious joke: "I did a show about business scams and now I'm here with you." Holmes doesn't bite.

Who's playing whom

Each of them has a role, and neither breaks it for long:

• Fielder plays the version of himself from his TV shows: deadpan, awkward, asking questions that seem designed to trip her up. He walks her through Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" to see whether she gets the joke. When she cries, he stares at her before handing over a tissue.
• Holmes plays calm. She insists that what happened at Theranos was miscommunication, not wrongdoing, and her reactions are so even that critics can't agree whether she misses Fielder's setups or sees right through them.
• Evans plays the protective partner, and keeps trying to steer the film. He interrupts an interview, asks for a share of the profits when Holmes leaves the room, and, in one shower scene, confronts the crew filming him through the glass.

Slate's Isaac Butler summed up the cast list in one line: "Everyone in the documentary is playing a character."

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The person who actually plays Holmes

Then the film jumps forward two years. Holmes is in prison, and Fielder has lost his star.

His solution is Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout. Fielder shows her the footage, and she becomes a collaborator. She performs scenes Fielder wrote to re-create conversations he had with Holmes that were never filmed, including a prison visit. She also gets Evans talking.

So the literal answer is neither. Fielder plays Fielder, and the one person playing Elizabeth Holmes is the actress who already had the job.

Critics have found Seyfried's Holmes the most natural presence in the film. Fielder, by at least one account, is noticeably gentler with her than he ever was with the original.

The film opens on the bars of a child's crib and ends on the bars of a prison.

Previously we wrote: Taika Waititi just pulled a Kevin Smith on Klara and the Sun's critics