When Elizabeth Holmes founded her health technology company Theranos in 2003, which made breakthroughs in blood testing, probably no one expected her to become a fraudster and one of the world’s “most disappointing leaders.”
Theranos soared in value in the early 2010s after developing methods that needed only small volumes of blood for testing. By 2015, Forbes named Holmes as one of the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaires in America. But by the following year, accusations of fraud about Theranos began to surface, and now her net worth is at zero.
The decline of Theranos started when a series of journalistic investigations revealed doubts about the company’s claims and whether Holmes was truthful to investors and the government. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Holmes, Theranos and its former COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, for raising $700 million from investors through a fraud involving false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the blood-testing technology they made. Balwani and Holmes were also having an affair throughout the company’s tenure, and staff claimed that those who “raised concerns or objections” were fired.
The federal trial officially ended in January 2022, and Holmes was sentenced to serve 11 years and three months at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, starting May 30, 2023. In addition, she and Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution fees to the victims.
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Weeks before serving in federal prison, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim and a film crew to document their lives before Holmes went to prison in April 2023. Fielder was even welcomed to the couple’s home and slept in their guest bedroom. You Can See Everything runs at almost three hours long, and the directors followed Holmes and her family over the course of three years.
You Can See Everything is distributed by independent production company A24, which houses many movies such as Everything, Everywhere All At Once, Backrooms, Past Lives, Lady Bird and many more, and Holmes had already reached out to the entertainment company before Oppenheim and Fielder agreed to direct. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the director pair admitted that making the documentary fried their brains, and that Holmes was convinced that she was innocent.
“The laws of reality and everything we thought was going on outside just evaporated,” Oppenheim told the magazine. “I feel like our brains were scrambled, and we were also unsure for so long if we even had anything worthwhile.”
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You Can See Everything is not the first medium to portray Holmes and her story. Hulu’s TV series The Dropout also portrays Holmes’ crimes, with Amanda Seyfried playing the disgraced CEO. Seyfried also appears in the new documentary, as herself and in the role of Holmes. According to Fielder and Oppenheim, they reached out to several people who knew or worked with Holmes, but none of them agreed to be in the film.
“Liz is toxic to people,” Fielder told Vanity Fair in another interview. “People did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her.”
“I found I was having this weird thought process where I was sort of tracking whether she was being honest or not at any given moment. It was a really disorienting experience,” Fielder also said at a post-screening Q&A.
You Can See Everything premiered as a secret screening at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival in Colorado last month, and viewers were required to give their phones to prevent leaked information. That same day, A24 released the trailer and announced the film would be in theaters on Oct. 16. The documentary was also added to the lineup of the 2026 New York Film Festival, and screened on Sept. 30.
Many critics have given You Can See Everything positive reviews, including the Los Angeles Times calling it “mesmerizing.” In addition, the film holds an approval rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 97 out of 100 on Metacritic. On Letterboxd, where users can log and rank movies they watch, it has a rating of 4.2 stars.
Fielder said that he is excited for audiences to finally see it.
“It was just a small group for so long,” the 43-year-old filmmaker and comedian said. “I actually think maybe it being out there, everyone can help me understand what I went through a little bit — or what we all went through.”
You Can See Everything is out in theaters nationwide on Friday, in Australia on Nov. 12 and the United Kingdom on Nov. 20.
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