Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spend 174 minutes with Elizabeth Holmes and come away with a film about whether a camera can tell when it is being lied to. It is unnerving, funny and a good half-hour too long.
The question You Can See Everything sets itself is a simple one. Elizabeth Holmes persuaded a great many clever people that a machine could do something it could not, and was convicted of fraud for it in 2022. If you put a documentary camera in front of her now, what do you get: the person, or another performance? Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, who direct and produce together, decide fairly early that they cannot answer this by watching Holmes harder. So they turn the camera round and watch themselves watching her, and the film runs 174 minutes because they keep finding new ways to do it.
The first hour is the plainest and in some ways the best. Fielder sits across from Holmes and asks questions a reporter would ask, in the level, slightly apologetic voice he has used on the people in his television work for years, and Holmes answers in a voice that is just as level. Neither gives anything. We laughed, more than once, at the sheer length of the pauses, and then felt uneasy about laughing, because the pauses are the point: two people who have both made careers out of not reacting, waiting each other out. Billy Evans often sits in on the interviews, and the film is quietly alert to him. He is the one person on screen who does react, and the tension between him and Fielder gives the early scenes a pulse the interviews alone would not have.
Then Amanda Seyfried arrives. She played Holmes in The Dropout in 2022, and the directors have her play her again, in reconstructions staged on sets by Alex DiGerlando that look like the real rooms with the corners not quite right. David Bolen shoots these with a cleaner, warmer light than he gives the actual interviews, so the copy is always a little more handsome than the original, which we took to be deliberate and a joke. Seyfried is eerie in them. She has the voice and the stare, and the film cuts between her Holmes and the real one until we stopped being certain, in a couple of shots, which was which. That is the moment the film earns its title.
Adam Locke-Norton’s editing is what holds the two halves together. The first half is patient to the point of stubbornness, long takes, few cuts; the second half, which takes a turn we will not describe, moves faster and starts to fold earlier scenes back in, so that things we watched as plain documentary come round again looking staged. Ari Balouzian’s score helps here: a thin, repeating figure that sounds almost like a tuning note, and that we only noticed had been there all along when it stopped.
The cost of all this is length. There is a stretch after the Seyfried material has been established and before the last movement begins where the film is restating its idea rather than developing it, and we were bored, and then faintly cross about being bored by a film this clever. Fielder and Oppenheim have different instincts: Oppenheim, who made Some Kind of Heaven, likes to let a scene sit and get beautiful; Fielder likes to interrupt it. For most of the running time the two pull in a useful direction. For perhaps thirty minutes in the middle they simply pull. A tighter cut would have lost nothing we could name.
The reviews so far put it a little under 90, and the praise clusters where ours does, on the Seyfried reconstructions and the last act. We land a few points lower, and the difference is almost entirely the middle hour. It is also fair to say that Holmes herself, by the end, has slightly receded: the film becomes about Fielder’s problem with filming her rather than about her, and if you came for the woman who ran Theranos you may feel she got away again.
Still, it is a documentary that does something we have not seen done this way, and it does it with a straight face. See it with other people if you can, because the laughter around you will tell you things about the film that the film is too polite to say.
