This article contains spoilers for You Can See Everything
About halfway into Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new A24 movie You Can See Everything, there is a scene that plays like a memory. Nathan Fielder stands, in the present of the movie, inside a San Diego ocean-front house looking out at the crashing waves, remembering. Then, playing for the viewer: two unidentifiable people in the ocean, frolicking, swimming in the icy cold waves, a blonde woman and a brunette man, both tall, both smiling. The camaraderie between them is undeniable.
This scene comes a few scenes after a black screen that reads “two years later.” Before that screen, before the present tense of the movie and the ocean-swimming blip of memory, You Can See Everything is an almost-straightforward embedded documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two children in the last month before Holmes goes into federal prison. The reason they’ve allowed a film crew into their home, Holmes and Evans each explain in their own ways, is to let the public see “the real Elizabeth Holmes,” not the character version of her created by Hollywood and “the media.”
Because it is Nathan Fielder, though, the first half of the film is part horror and part comedy, saturated with stunned disbelief. Fielder looms outside their window while the small family plays together. He watches them from the patio while they play in the waves. The majority of the shots are incredibly close up. You can see the pores on Evans’s face in high-definition as he complains that Holmes is misunderstood. You can see the tiny wrinkles under her eyes as she smiles. You can see the pimple on Fielder’s face and the stubble threatening to break through his skin. The first half of the movie is intimate. Fielder falls in love with his subject the way all reporters working on a profile do in some way. You think so much about a person, spend so much time with them, live in their house, consider their perspective entirely until you develop a kind of obsession with them that borders on affection.
He becomes playful with her. In one scene, he asks her if she’s ever told a lie, and she tells him she never has, at least not since she was a child. “Liz, what?” Fielder exclaims, incredulous, the way you might with a friend. He does not know what to make of her. Later, she asks him to go with her to swim in the ocean. Fielder demurs; he doesn’t like cold water. But you can see in the way he responds to her that he wants to go, that he’s considering it.
In another scene, he shows her and Evans the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First?” routine. She smiles at the screen, laughs at the joke, and Fielder watches her. He tries to press her, to ask her what’s funny about it, and she defers, says something about them miscommunicating. When he explicitly lays out that the baseball player at first is supposed to be named “Who,” she says, big eyes, head nodding, “I didn’t get it.” Fielder clearly does not know how to respond to this. You can see his eyes searching hers, trying to know if she’s telling the truth. But there is no resolution. There is only what she says, which is that she doesn’t understand it, and what we feel as a viewer, which is mildly unsettled. Something is amiss. But what exactly?
The whole first half of the movie feels golden and surreal. Holmes explains her ongoing and misguided conviction that she did nothing wrong. Evans for some reason allows the camera crew to film him fully nude in the shower. Fielder meets her parents, and when he tries to talk to her father about Holmes’s ex-boyfriend and business partner Sonny Balwani, the two of them are reprimanded by Evans for their conversation as if they are both family. Fielder travels with them to Austin for the last night before she goes to prison. He is unwavering in the direct questions he asks them and does not back down against their magnificent charm. “I know how you feel,” Evans says at one point, and Fielder nicely but sharply responds, “No you don’t.”
Up until this point, You Can See Everything is an effective humanization of Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans. But it does not do much else. What are we to make of all of this? A much worse version of the movie ends there, with Holmes in prison and that question still front of mind.
But Fielder and Oppenheim waited, and this is what makes You Can See Everything a mesmerizing, bonkers beauty of a film. After the "Two years later," we are in a meta universe, the reality of the new present, where the first half of the movie is the past. The movie we, the audience, have just seen is being played on a laptop placed on top of a stack of books on a coffee table. We see the same scene we saw twenty minutes earlier: Elizabeth Holmes watching The Dropout—a Hulu series based on her life and scandal where she is played by Amanda Seyfried—on a laptop next to Fielder and Evans in her bed, crying after a fictionalized scene. In the new present of the movie, we see Amanda Seyfried, seated on the couch next to Nathan Fielder, watching the movie we’ve just seen, reacting to the scene of Holmes crying in the bed.
Here, in the second half of the movie, You Can See Everything becomes a meditation on truth, memory, and fraud. It evolves into something stranger and much more fascinating. It is as if Fielder and Oppenheimer knew that audiences, at the end of those 90 minutes, would be sitting in a pool of unprocessed questions and unsatisfied with where they had ended up.
In one particularly poignant moment, Fielder and Seyfried visit Evans in his Austin home. The time jump here is even more obvious. Evans is bloated and more disheveled than before Holmes went into prison. The baby is now toddling around, and a Komodo dragon roams around the home. The three of them (Evans, Fielder, and Seyfried) have dinner at the table, and with the glassy eyes that wine sometimes brings, and they fight. Evans transforms into something darker and scarier in front of Seyfried. He tells her “I’ve got vengeance in my heart,” and “I’m pretty strategic and well resourced. I know people who can do just about anything.”
When Seyfried balks at the revelation that Evans has gained power of attorney over Holmes and is writing tweets as his wife and publishing them, Evans turns back on her with ammo he has clearly been holding on to since before her arrival. With a glimmer in his eyes, he brings up that Seyfried herself was in the crosshairs of the public in that moment because she correctly described Charlie Kirk as “hateful” after his assassination. Evans tries to deploy this against her, to hit her in a sore spot. “You’re an actress,” Evans spits at her. “I’m more well-read than you.”
Holmes went to prison on May 30, 2023. Kirk’s assassination happened in Sept. 2025. By waiting those two years, Fielder and Oppenheim created something that is less a humanizing look at Holmes and her family and more a philosophical question about what we believe about one another.
“I actually think maybe [the movie] being out there, everyone can help me understand what I went through a little bit. Or what we all went through,” Fielder said at a post-screening Q&A. That process is entirely a by-product of time. If Fielder and Oppenheim released the first half of You Can See Everything— as beautiful, haunting and unsettling as it is—the questions would be stuck with the viewer alone. It's not that the second half provides the answers, but I felt as if the movie was engaged in the act of questioning with me, instead of setting me off to sea with my own thoughts.
The work of the movie begins with the title: You Can See Everything. It’s something Holmes says to Fielder when she invites him to move in with them, but it’s colored by an earlier question between the two of them about what the word “can” means. Obviously, we cannot see everything. In the final moments of the film, Seyfried asks Fielder a pointed question about bias, and whether he can see “Liz” clearly through all of the emotion and connection he feels with her. Of course he can’t, the movie seems to say. But isn’t that what’s so interesting about it all? Even with a camera crew, a strong will, and the full intention to be critically minded, a person cannot help but see what he sees himself. We are each flawed, each narrow-minded and biased in our own way.
In the final moments of the film, the memory from the mid-point returns. Two people swim in the ocean, their arms flapping, their mouths open in joyful laughter. But this time the camera zooms in, and there is no question who it is. There is Nathan Fielder, his hair plastered wet to his forehead, his long arms diving into a wave. Right behind him is Elizabeth Holmes.
