Other people have been telling the Elizabeth Holmes story for years. Newspaper reporting brought Theranos down, Hulu turned the collapse into an Emmy-winning miniseries with Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, and billboard photos, fake Twitter accounts and AI chatbots supplied the rest. “You Can See Everything,” the documentary Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim made in secret, is the first time in years that Holmes has spoken at length in public. Most of the raves leave out one part of the story: she went looking for it.

From Telluride to New York, critics have treated the film as a duel between the disgraced founder and the comedian whose shows blur performance and reality. WBUR’s Sean Burns calls it the story of “a master manipulator meeting his match.” Screen Daily’s Tim Grierson writes that in Holmes the filmmakers “have met their match.” Both lines are fair, and both are written from Fielder’s side. Tell it as Holmes’s story and the sequence matters: before the comedian came to study her, she had asked for an audience.

The pitch Holmes made

Variety’s account of the New York Film Festival Q&A explains how it began. Holmes had approached A24 about having someone document her life, and Fielder, who had read “Bad Blood,” arranged a meeting through the studio. She and her partner, Billy Evans, then invited Fielder and Oppenheim into their rented home in Del Mar for the 34 days before she reported to prison. According to The Associated Press, Fielder lived in the guest house and filming ran from morning to night. Fielder recalled how she framed it: “First and foremost, we see this as a human story.”

He still says he does not know why she picked him. “I wouldn’t think I’d be the person you would want for your final period,” he told the audience in New York. When he did guess, he hedged it: “maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was like a friend of theirs, no one would take that seriously.” Then he added, “I don’t know, it’s so hard to speculate.”

A mirror with a camera

The comparisons critics reach for say a lot. Burns cites Nick Broomfield’s “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam,” which ends with its director fooled by his subjects, “a fate Fielder spends this picture strenuously trying to avoid.” TheWrap’s William Bibbiani goes back further and calls the new film possibly “the finest autopsy of deception, and indictment of truth, since Orson Welles‘ ‘F for Fake.'” This time, though, the person holding the camera is under suspicion too.

Grierson notes that “both men have been accused of manipulating events in their nonfiction projects to manufacture specific outcomes,” and that Fielder’s own series star him “or, perhaps, a slightly exaggerated version of himself.” Bibbiani is blunter: anyone who knows Fielder “will probably think he’s up to something, since he’s a master manipulator himself.” That is the mirror. Each has been accused of staging reality, and each spends the film trying to read the other. In the first teaser, Holmes puts it in the language of sincerity: “Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.”

None of the critics claims to have read her. Burns writes that “she insists she’s never told a lie in her entire adult life,” and that Fielder’s “cheeky faux-naïf schtick repeatedly slams into the unreadable brick wall that is Elizabeth Holmes.” Grierson concludes that “spending time with Holmes is not the same thing as actually knowing her.” Fielder’s own account says much the same. She “seems so genuine at times,” he said, until he caught himself thinking, “Okay, I know she’s a liar.” Oppenheim said everyone who worked on the film went through “a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance.”

The part she could not control

The reviews agree that the film changes once Holmes is in prison. Burns says it “folds in on itself” and becomes “a dazzling hall of mirrors and reenactments,” and Grierson writes that Fielder learns “disturbing new information once Holmes is behind bars.” NBC Bay Area reported that off-camera conversations, including some with Holmes in prison, were re-created with an A-list actress whose identity the film keeps as a reveal. TheWrap says the film also shows Holmes watching “The Dropout,” the series in which Seyfried played her.

Holmes’s side did not get the final word on any of it. At Telluride, Fielder said that near the end Evans “was trying to exert, we felt, a lot of control over the process,” and that communication broke down. Oxygen reported that, according to Fielder, the couple had not yet seen the film, and that Holmes’s attorney did not respond to its request for comment. Few people from her past agreed to appear. “Liz is toxic to people,” Fielder said.

Where Holmes is now

Holmes, 42, was convicted on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy and entered a Texas prison on May 30, 2023. NBC News reported that a judge cut her sentence in March from 135 to 123 months. She is held at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas, with a scheduled release date of February 22, 2030, and is due to move to a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas, in August 2027. She owes $452 million in restitution jointly with her former partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and her request for a commutation is still pending. Nothing in the reporting connects the documentary to that request.

A24 releases “You Can See Everything,” which runs 174 minutes, in US theaters on October 16, after premieres at Telluride and the New York Film Festival. Screen Daily reports a UK release on November 20.

Burns notes that the title comes from Holmes’s promise to the filmmakers, which he says “sounds more like a threat.” She kept her promise for 34 days in Del Mar. The film took another three years to finish, and for most of that time she was in prison in Texas, with no say over what the filmmakers would make of what she had shown them.

Tags: Pelé, Marc Anthony, Meghan Markle, Orson Welles, Christopher Abbott, Nathan Fielder, Pete Holmes, Simon Callow, Amanda Seyfried, Elizabeth Holmes