A24 slipped a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes into the Telluride Film Festival on Sept. 6 without listing it on any program, confiscating attendees' phones at the door and swearing the audience to secrecy about what they were about to see. Ten days later, "You Can See Everything" — the hybrid film Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent three years making about the disgraced Theranos founder's final weeks of freedom — has become the most talked-about title of the fall festival circuit, and, awards strategists say, a genuine threat to the Best Picture race.
The 174-minute film follows Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, beginning 37 days before she reported to federal prison to serve her sentence for defrauding Theranos investors. Fielder, better known for deadpan stunts on "Nathan for You" and HBO's "The Rehearsal," appears on camera as an increasingly implicated interviewer, while Amanda Seyfried — who played Holmes in the Hulu series "The Dropout" — turns up as an unsettling doubling device. Reviews have been near-uniform in their astonishment: Metacritic lists the film at 94 out of 100 based on early notices, a score the aggregator classifies as "universal acclaim."
A Screening Under Lock and Key
Telluride's program listed the film only as a "secret screening," and press in the room were asked not to describe plot details before the credits rolled. What leaked out anyway was disbelief. Early reactions collected by Deadline at Telluride ran to one-word verdicts — "Shocking," "Brilliant," "Insane" — and at least one blunter question from an attendee: "What the f--- did I just watch?" Writing in Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman went further, describing it as:
a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus that overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness.
Owen Gleiberman, Variety
Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors in Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded and ran until it collapsed amid revelations that its technology never worked as promised. Fielder and Oppenheim's cameras caught the run-up to her surrender: family visits, the retrieval of old Theranos equipment from storage, and a strange closeness growing between filmmaker and subject that even Fielder seems unable to fully explain. "I don't know why they wanted me there," he says in the film, according to an account from World of Reel. "Why am I there?" Holmes, for her part, tells Fielder repeatedly across the film that she has never lied — that she has only been misunderstood, or misrepresented by people with their own agendas — a claim the documentary neither endorses nor directly rebuts, leaving the gap between her account and her conviction for the audience to sit with.
An Unlikely Best Picture Play
A24 is now weighing whether to campaign the film for best documentary feature or push it into the top category outright. According to Variety's awards desk, studio strategists see a chance, across this year's slate, to challenge a record that has stood since MGM landed five best-picture nominations at the ninth Academy Awards in 1937. The push has also revived a familiar Oscars argument: because the line between documentary and staged reenactment blurs so thoroughly in "You Can See Everything," some campaign strategists are debating whether its central performance — Holmes essentially playing herself, at Fielder's direction — could be eligible for an acting nomination at all.
"You Can See Everything" screens next at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 30 at Alice Tully Hall, before A24 releases it theatrically on Oct. 16. Whether wider audiences share Telluride's shock — or start asking harder questions about the ethics of embedding with a convicted fraudster for three years — remains the open question hanging over the film's awards run this winter.
