Elizabeth Holmes famously does not blink, whether she’s pitching investors or, by her own admission, flirting with a guy.
Is her moony gaze haunting or hypnotic? A calculated act or proof of her naivete? At various points in A24’s new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” I vacillated between each of the above.
A good portion of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s movie could be classified as a provocative staring contest, as Fielder probes Holmes about her life and the demise of her company, Theranos, in the weeks before she reported to prison to serve an 11-year sentence in May 2023.
The answers he gets from Holmes are rarely satisfactory. (At one point, she insists she’s never told a lie in her entire adult life; despite being convicted of fraud, she maintains her innocence throughout the film.) But with the camera zoomed in tight on Holmes’ every micro-expression and clump of mascara, the movie’s power is in the questions it raises in the space between her words.
In these profoundly uncanny scenes, I found myself fluctuating between being freaked out by the lack of emotion in Holmes’ vacuous gaze and, to my surprise, pitying her. Then I’d quickly shift back to being freaked out, because what if pity was exactly the reaction that Holmes — a talented, convicted fraudster — was angling for? If she could manipulate her voice to sound more authoritative in the workplace, she could certainly adapt her face to appear more sympathetic onscreen.
It turns out that just because you can see everything, that doesn’t mean you know anything. At least not for sure.
‘You Can See Everything’ is not the movie it appears to be
Much like its subject, “You Can See Everything” is a slippery mind-trick of a film — part character study, part psychological thriller, part surrealist thought experiment. What it is not, despite its subject, is a movie about a tech company.
The story of how Holmes went from being named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes to being convicted of defrauding investors as the founder and CEO of the blood-testing startup Theranos is well documented. Holmes has already been the subject of a more traditional documentary, Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which exhaustively maps the discrepancies within Theranos, and a scripted Hulu miniseries, “The Dropout,” which dramatizes Holmes’ origin story and attempts to illustrate how her ambitions outpaced her abilities.
Both of those works lean into the prevailing narrative about Holmes, who was often pitched as “the next Steve Jobs” and proved especially skilled at wooing powerful men to her cause.
“You want it to be true so badly,” Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee-turned-whistleblower, says of Holmes’ vision in Gibney’s doc. “I was working with these devices every single day, and she could still kind of convince me. When I think back on those conversations, I just think, ‘How did she do that?'”
The Holmes we see in “You Can See Everything” is tamer, gentler, and, at times, far more submissive than many headlines would have us believe. Yet even Fielder isn’t immune to her strange charisma.
Early in the film, Fielder admits to Holmes that he did a lot of research about her tenure at Theranos. He challenges her answers to questions, at one point telling Holmes, “I don’t think anyone will ever believe you ever again.”
Yet, as time goes on, Fielder seems alternately bemused and unnerved by the onetime wunderkind — though never to the point of aversion. On the contrary, Holmes seems to draw Fielder ever closer, like a close-up magician with a deck of cards in her hands and a trick up her sleeve.
Toward the end of the film, Fielder’s memory is called into question. A friend asks if Fielder is retroactively polishing his interactions with Holmes, perhaps unconsciously, because he’s grown to care about her. Maybe he wants to protect her.
Seemingly taken aback, Fielder replies, “I’m not putting my feelings into this. I’m just trying to be accurate.”
It’s one thing to be told someone is a master manipulator, as “The Inventor” and “The Dropout” plainly do. It’s quite another to experience the manipulation firsthand. “You Can See Everything” offers audiences the latter.
During a Q&A after an early screening of “You Can See Everything” in New York, Oppenheim described how he, Fielder, and the crew would swap interpretations of what they’d just seen and heard after the cameras were switched off. “The disagreements were so dynamic,” Oppenheim recalled.
It’s been over three years since their close encounter of the Holmesian kind, and Fielder said he’s still trying to process what he felt in her presence.
“I’m really curious to hear what everyone else thinks, and what they make of certain things,” Fielder said. “I think it will actually help me understand.”
“You Can See Everything” is in theaters now.
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