In April of 2023, co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim started filming former Theranos CEO and convicted fraudster, Elizabeth Holmes, in her home a month before her sentencing began. The end product is the 2026 release of “You Can See Everything,” a documentary that uses a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio that brings the viewer uncomfortably close to its subject but leaves just enough out of frame to leave these reviewers wondering: did we really see everything? 

The film’s subject, Elizabeth Holmes, was convicted in January 2022 for conspiracy to commit fraud on investors and then sentenced to prison for 135 months in the following November. What makes Elizabeth Holmes a fascinating subject to film and what ultimately contributes to the film’s success was Holmes’s strong assurance for the effectiveness of her device and a professional charisma that invited millions of dollars of investments for Theranos. 

The Elizabeth Holmes in interviews and on billboards is a stranger compared to the one in “You Can See Everything.” In the documentary, she’s still working on what remains of Theranos, continuing the story that she was wrongly convicted. She’s in a relationship — in both the romantic and business sense — and has two children. There’s hardly a scene in the film where she’s seen without her kids or her partner, Billy Evans. Elizabeth Holmes wants to sell the story that she’s nothing more than a loving mother and determined entrepreneur. 

But it was a story that was hard to buy, so I was left feeling like I was watching a bizarre performance. 

Comedian Nathan Fielder is hardly a stranger to bizarre performances. His tentpole projects before this were the Comedy Central program “Nathan For You” and the HBO series “The Rehearsal.” In the former, he would find businesses across the United States and give them unconventional advice, leading to hijinks that would sometimes leave his marks in worse places than when he started working with them. Fielder would always play it straight, however, and the line dividing the character of Nathan Fielder and the person of Nathan Fielder was sometimes impossible to find.  

The end result of this collaboration is a documentary where one of the directors is as much of a subject as the subject herself. Fielder is purposefully unobjective, leaving us to wonder if the comedian has fallen under the spell of Holmes, a woman reviled as a master manipulator. 

Anyone who hasn’t seen the movie already should walk in without any expectations, save one: don’t trust anything you see. For a documentary, this film makes no effort to suggest a clear truth about Elizabeth Holmes and whether or not she believes in the things she says to Fielder. If anything, the film takes deliberate steps to make things less certain.  

Walking out of the theater, I wondered if it was possible to ever trust anything we see on a screen again. This is ultimately the question that signals the film’s importance to the current world and the generation of students that are students at Creighton. All of us, wanting to or not, are natives to an almost completely digital world. When was the last time you found something out about the world that wasn’t online?  

It’s common practice for schools to preach about how social media isn’t fully real — the lives of people as lived in their posts and stories are fictional, curated and constructed. But when that etiquette of construction is fully absorbed by an entire generational cohort, the distressing question is if that fiction can be separated from reality.     

For those waiting to take a chance on this movie, there is still time — most films run about three to six weeks, and successful films like this one run on the higher end of that range, placing the time limit in late November.