'You Can See Everything' review: the Nathan Fielder film about Elizabeth Holmes is an instant classic
Key Points
- Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary, released through A24, achieves rare technical mastery and narrative force, with repeated questioning and museum-quality cinematography making it resonate as cultural moment.
- A screening poll found 14 of 16 viewers felt more positive toward Holmes after watching, suggesting the film's intimate framing and her post-conviction participation shift audience sympathy despite the documented fraud.
- The production escalates Fielder's career from social experiments to feature-length interrogation of a real person at inflection point, with all production elements aligning to create unexpected emotional weight.
Summary
"You Can See Everything" Is an Instant Classic—and It's Reframing Elizabeth Holmes
Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary landed as a cultural moment. The film, which premiered this week through A24, manages the rare feat of being both technically masterful and narratively absurd enough to work as entertainment even if you know the ending.
The core appeal is Fielder's method: he repeatedly asks Holmes the same question—"Why do you feel that way?"—until something breaks. It's a simple, almost comedic interrogation technique that forms the spine of the entire production. The cinematography is pristine throughout, shot in tight spaces like a Del Mar beach house but lit and composed with museum-quality precision. The craft across every department—cinematography, color grading, casting—reads as expert work from A24 down through the camera operators.
What's notable is the emotional reframing it achieves. Liz Wessel, an investor at First Round, polled 16 attendees from a 150-person screening she organized. The results: 14 of 16 said they felt more positive about Holmes after watching, even if they wouldn't call themselves fans. Only one felt more negative. All 16, however, felt more negative about her ex-partner Billy Evans.
The film includes extended scenes of Holmes with her children and ends with a particularly intimate shot—her pumping breast milk before prison, a framing that lands harder than any argumentative structure could. Whether by design or editing, that visual carries the weight of the whole thing.
Holmes agreed to participate after serving eleven years, a dynamic that tilts the audience's sympathy toward her. There's nowhere to go but up, and the film lets that asymmetry work on viewers. You don't have to believe she's innocent or that her conviction was wrong to come away feeling something closer to pity.
The whole production feels like a natural escalation of Fielder's career—from Nathan for You's elaborate social experiments to a feature-length interrogation of a real person at a genuine inflection point in her life. That it worked, that all these moving parts aligned, reads as almost unbelievable in retrospect.
Every deal, every interview. 5 minutes.
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