You Can See Everything review: an odyssey of deception

Acouple of months ago, ultra-cool production house A24 dropped the first teaser trailer for You Can See Everything. In an unsettling close-up, overlaid by an ominous soundscape, comedian and experimental filmmaker Nathan Fielder stares into the eyes of Elizabeth Holmes, the former tech guru who’d been sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. After a four-month fraud trial, she was found guilty of misleading investors about the capabilities of a product that she’d claimed could run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood.

In the clip, the camera zooms in on Fielder as he holds her glassy, unbroken gaze. “Why would I deceive you?” she asks flatly. “There’s no reason for me to do that.” Clearly, this wasn’t going to be some prosaic pan-and-zoom affair with peppy talking heads narrating the tale in neat soundbites. “I thought this was a trailer for a horror movie,” one Redditor wrote, summing up the mood of the interaction that set the internet alight and turned Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim’s team-up into the must-see film of the year.

Yet that snippet isn’t even in the actual movie – at least, not in the same form. Instead, the scene is softer, the atmosphere close instead of creepy, the conversation more freely flowing. It’s just one rug-pull in Fielder and Oppenheim’s three-hour opus of deception.

Broken into three sections, the first sees Fielder move in with Holmes and her young family as he attempts to unravel the mystery of how a woman once heralded as the next Steve Jobs wound up being one of America’s most notorious fraudsters. When she begins her prison sentence, which robs the filmmakers of their subject, Fielder closes in on her partner Billy Evans, a right-wing tech bro who’s been left to run another blood-testing company and may be more than a little suspect. Finally, unable to film Holmes when he visits her in prison, Fielder casts actor Amanda Seyfried (who portrayed her in the TV series The Dropout) to reenact their encounter behind bars.

You Can See Everything has been hailed as a new form of documentary, but as Oppenheim pointed out at a recent screening, these three styles – cinéma vérité, the documentarian as host, dramatic re-enactments – have been part of the medium’s language for decades. The movie, though, is forward-thinking and provocative in its dissection of personal perspectives and the shifty nature of reality.

Holmes claims she was simply misunderstood when she explained the science behind her invention. Is that possible? In the film’s final stretch, Fielder and Seyfried become a kind of detective duo, pondering their subject’s culpability – she the sceptical Dana Scully, he the more open-minded Fox Mulder. They’re listening to the same testimonies but hearing different things. The movie is overhyped and overlong, with the action dragging slightly until Evans’ dubious behaviour comes to light. But in a world of fake news and subjective ‘truth’, it will rightly be remembered as an emblem of its age.