'You Can See Everything' looks at a disgraced founder, then turns the camera on us

A movie review

This is the kind of release we wouldn't normally see in a cinema in the Philippines. It's an art film, it's a documentary, and the main character—ex-billionaire Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy—isn't prominent enough here to attract a wide audience.

It makes sense though that "You Can See Everything," unlike others before it, is carried in Philippine theaters. After all, it has set a record for non-music documentaries with a $15.6-million opening. It's being pitched as an Oscar contender for Best Picture, defying its own category. It has borne meme after meme, parodies on placards cheering runners at the New York Marathon, and a Jamie Lee Curtis skit on "Jimmy Fallon." It stars an actor who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in fiction, only to reenact her in nonfiction. It is a phenomenon. 

But the spectacle surrounding the film is almost as strange as the story it tells. 

Canadian filmmaker Nathan Fielder and American director Lance Oppenheim craft a nearly three-hour film about Holmes, her partner Evans, and their children first by filming their day-to-day routines as a family. It is 2023, a month before Holmes commits to prison after her conviction. The company she founded defrauded investors of millions of dollars by promising a revolutionary machine that analyzes a drop of blood. What she delivered was a dud.

In welcoming cameras into their home, Evans hopes to present Holmes as the uncomplaining homemaker and science ideologue who refuses to give up on her dreams of life-saving tech. Though in giving Fielder a free hand, at times reluctantly, Evans also surrenders control over how their story is told. It turned out to be a dizzying study of truth, acting and observation, that also somehow manages to be funny.

“You Can See Everything” is a dizzying study of truth, acting and observation that also somehow manages to be funny..

Columbia Pictures Philippines

"You Can See Everything" may be remembered for what is perhaps one of the strangest scenes in cinema: Holmes tears up as she watches Amanda Seyfried play her on TV, and the film cuts to Seyfried watching that footage of Holmes watching her. The iconic meta sequence in Christopher Nolan's "Inception" uses mirrors in a dream. Here, Fielder and Oppenheim use laptop screens and a different kind of mirror, the one thing two very different women have in common: their large, luminous eyes.

In fact, much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, with the camera lingering longer than Holmes' characteristic steady, unblinking stare. The camera looks back at Fielder's gaze, supposedly that of a neutral observer of Holmes and Evans' home life. It also takes in long conversations and walks on the beach, peers through partially opened doors, and shoots both the subjects and the messengers.

The longer the camera watches, however, the harder it becomes to distinguish between someone revealing herself and someone performing for an audience. It amazes me how Fielder intervenes to peel back personal complexities through his interviews while alternately serving as a fly on the wall in the classic documentary style.

All this is central to what the movie explores, among other contradictions. Seyfried may be the acclaimed actor, but has Holmes out-acted her? Is acting a form of lying? And is the moral weight of a lie lifted if the speaker believes it?

These questions don't apply to Holmes alone. They extend to the people behind the camera who also decide what to show and what to conceal. The kind of access they've been granted guarantees they see more. But closing the distance between the observer and the observed can yield either a rare clarity or a blurred line.

The audience, in effect, are also allowed into the very spaces the characters and filmmakers share—the rented beach house in San Diego, Evans' home in Texas, Fielder's hotel room, the field where Seyfried's horses graze, her cozy fireplace, and finally, the visiting area at detention. We're supposed to just observe, but if this is among Holmes' elaborate performances, then we, like Evans, participate in her many transgressions simply by being there, and being too close.

"You Can See Everything" may be billed as an Elizabeth Holmes movie, though it is also a movie about the moviemakers, the media and everyone who shapes the stories we tell. That includes us, the viewers. The result is one of the most extraordinary films of the decade.

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'You Can See Everything' opens in cinemas November 18 under Columbia Pictures Philippines. Runtime: 2 hours and 54 minutes.