Review: You Can See Everything is worth every second we had to wait for it

Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes exposé is a volcanic mindfuck you have to see to believe.

It is desperately sad. It is frequently funny. It is sometimes suffocating, often overwhelming, and deeply disturbing. It is tense. It is so intense. I chewed my nails, rubbed my earlobes, buried my face in my hands. I fought the urge to pace around the theatre and yell “Come on!” at the screen. When it was over, I stumbled to my car, gripped the steering wheel and screamed out the stress.

In You Can See Everything, you will see everything. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s twisted Elizabeth Holmes exposé surpasses the hype. You won’t care that it took an extra month to get the pair’s bonkers documentary to New Zealand, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the spoilers, because nothing compares to enduring this volcanic mindfuck for yourself.

That’s because so many twists pile up across its 174 minutes you will lose count. Fielder and Oppenheim layer them up, outdoing each revelation with the next. They deliver one WTF? moment after the other, then return to them, re-examining them for clues, all in search for an answer to the question that sits at the heart of this messy tale: who is in on this grift?

You Can See Everything puts everyone under a microscope. Is it Holmes, the wide-eyed Silicon Valley fraudster jailed for 11 (reduced to 10) years over the failed blood test start-up Theranos? Fielder will force you to reconsider everything you know – even if you’ve ingested the John Carreyrou book, the ABC News podcast, the Alex Gibney documentary and the Hulu TV series. 

Or is it Billy Evans, Holmes’ fiancé and the father of their two children? Here, like Holmes and Fielder, he seems to be playing a series of complex mind games of his own. Watching Evans and Fielder endlessly toy with each other is an enduring highlight, a side quest that grows into something more potent, potentially a much bigger piece of this infuriating puzzle.

Cleverly, Fielder and Oppenheim ask if they’re part of the grift too. For the first half of the film, they move in with Holmes in the month before her 2023 prison sentence begins, filming her, Evans and their two children for 16 hours a day. Like he does in his crazed HBO TV show The Rehearsal, Fielder lurks in the background, his awkward presence adding levity, which he cleverly uses to interject with potent, searing questions.

He and Oppenheim attempt to find meaning in the most mundane of things: a cooked breakfast, an unmade bed, a swim in the ocean, a text message, a single tear. Better yet, they find rich veins of gold and plunder them. Pitting TV's beloved Nathan For You prankster against one of the most notorious liars of our generation turns this quest for truth into a magic carpet thrill-ride.

Nothing is tied up neatly in a bow. This rollercoaster never returns to Earth. Doubt has been cast over whether this can be called a documentary, a fair question considering Fielder's gonzo past. I would argue no matter how outrageous You Can See Everything gets – even when it jets off into the stratosphere and goes properly fucking nuts – the hallmarks of solid, deeply researched journalism remain all over this. 

I haven’t stopped thinking about You Can See Everything since I saw it, which is surely the mark of a truly great film. But what did I see? Like Fielder, I frequently found myself feeling sorry for Holmes, positioned here as a mother being taken away from her children. Then I would remember the reason she is in jail – four counts of criminal fraud with a restitution debt of US$452 million.

In the days since, my feelings about this film have refused to settle, changing on day two, then on day four and again on day seven. I can’t find a fixed position. A second viewing hasn't help clarify things. “Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” Oppenheim has said, so perhaps crafting a meticulous shapeshifting wonder that is impossible to grasp is entirely the point.

It sucks that we had to wait a month, adrift in a sea of spoilers. But it doesn’t matter. You Can See Everything will still mess you up, rewire your brain, turn you inside out. I’ve already been twice, and I will go again. Brace yourself, Nath Heads, because you have no idea what’s about to hit you – and maybe you never will.

You Can See Everything is in theatres from today