You Can See Everything: Everyone is obsessed with Nathan Fielder’s doco on Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes

Before its secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival two weeks ago, few people even knew You Can See Everything existed.

Now, the documentary about convicted Theranos fraudster and one-time founder darling Elizabeth Holmes is all anyone wants to talk about and to see. OK, marketing gods, you got us. Well played.

The documentary feature was filmed in 2023 in the 34 days before Holmes began her 11-year prison sentence with filmmaker Nathan Fielder embedded within the family home, and will then track them over the next three years.

Fielder is known as a mercurial figure who puts himself in his largely non-fiction work - although it’s also never fully clear what is and isn’t real in his TV shows which has included Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. He also made the scripted drama The Curse, which co-starred Emma Stone.

He has also proven himself committed to a bit, really putting himself on the line. For the second season of The Rehearsal, Fielder learnt and obtained a licence to fly a 747 jumbo jet. Tom Cruise, eat your heart out.

Fielder has an awkward screen presence and seems to thrive on making people uncomfortable, so the proposition of him taking on Theranos, and getting too close to his oddball subject is what has sent social media into a frenzy.

Because the cool film kids are all over You Can See Everything, which shot up to the top, or near the top, of must-watch lists as soon as it made its existence known. There’s even hype - at this point, just hype - that this could be the first documentary to be nominated for best picture Oscar.

You Can See Everything dropped its full trailer today, revealing a bit more of what to expect after the first teaser was released earlier this month.

That initial video featured what seemed like an agonisingly long exchange (in reality, under a minute) between Holmes and Fielder in which she claimed that she had no reason to deceive him, and therefore wasn’t.

The camera just holds the gaze of her manic eyes while occasionally cutting to Fielder looking incredulous. It’s achingly hard to watch, but you also can’t look away. It’s also wild to watch someone who has been convicted for fraud – so, essentially, for lying – to claim that she’s “always being real”.

Is it psychopathy or delusion?

Now, the full trailer pulls out with more context, and also includes Holmes’ husband, Billy Evans, who Fielder challenges, asking if he really believes his wife hasn’t lied to him, even bringing up whether she might’ve been attracted to his family’s wealth.

Fielder co-directed the almost three-hour movie with Lance Oppenheimer, a young filmmaker with a documentary background who also helmed the upcoming feature Primetime starring Robert Pattinson.

Primetime had premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 5 and when Oppenheim rushed to Telluride immediately afterwards, it was thought that the Pattinson thriller, which was not on the line-up, would be the “secret screening” at the American festival.

Instead, distributor A24 revealed You Can See Everything. At the post-screening Q&A, moderated by Stone, Fielder said, “I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced.

“And one of the things I’m genuinely excited about is for this movie to come out and for people to help me understand what I experienced. Truly, to this day, I don’t quite know what I went through.”

Holmes’ story has been documented before. She dropped out of Stanford University and founded Theranos, a medical tech company which said would revolutionise blood testing.

At one point, the business was valued at $US9 billion, and Holmes was one of the richest women in the world and feted by billionaire investors, the power elite and the media. She was named in the Time 100 in 2015.

That same year, medical researchers and The Wall Street Journal began to question the veracity of Holmes’ claims. She and former Theranos president Sunny Balwani were charged with fraud and conspiracy in 2018 after it emerged the pinprick technology the company had heralded was never successfully developed.

Holmes was found guilty in 2022 and started her sentence in May 2023.

Amanda Seyfried played Holmes in the 2022 miniseries The Dropout, for which she won an Emmy.

There is no confirmed release date in Australia.