A former research engineer who worked closely with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos says “You Can See Everything” doesn’t show, well, everything.
You may remember Tyler Shultz from HBO’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” or even the fictionalized series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried as the disgraced Theranos CEO. He was one of the whistleblowers who raised the alarm when Holmes’ blood-testing technology was not the revolutionary medical device she claimed it to be. Shultz met Holmes through his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who sat on the Theranos board of directors and scored Shultz an internship at the medical diagnostic startup, which quickly evolved into a full-time position as a research engineer. During his eight months on the job, he realized something was terribly wrong.
“You Can See Everything” directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim may have fallen into Holmes’ carefully curated trap, Shultz warns in a new essay.
“I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32,” he wrote in a Stat News op-ed published Monday.
“I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told [New York Times reporter] John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Glenn Whipp wrote that the film leaves viewers with many questions: “about Holmes, about the slippery nature of truth and about the objectivity of documentary filmmaking itself.” The film, labeled a documentary, grossed $15 million this weekend, making it the second-highest-grossing opening for the genre.
But Shultz says that while “You Can See Everything” is an entertaining piece of art, it’s certainly not a documentary, and “it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.”
Shultz calls out what he says are misleading components of the film, including the blood-testing device that Holmes shows Fielder.
“Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, ‘THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE,’” Shultz writes. “That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the entirely wrong thing.”
The research engineer-turned-whistleblower also called out the quaint two-bedroom condo in which the film was shot, pointing out that Holmes had just recently lived with partner Billy Evans, whose family owns a luxury resort in San Diego, in an estate listed at $125 million.
He also raises questions about the abuse Holmes suffered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, convicted fraudster and Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Shultz claims Holmes spotted Balwani’s abusive tendencies and clocked him as the perfect fall guy if things went south.
In the mindbending documentary “You Can See Everything,” comedian Nathan Fielder and professed inventor Elizabeth Holmes sit in her beach house staring at each other like gunslingers. Fielder is the creator of the TV series “The Rehearsal” and “Nathan for You” who constructs discombobulating sham realities that include bogus businesses such as Dumb Starbucks. Holmes is the former billionaire CEO of Theranos who pretended she’d built a revolutionary blood testing machine to squeeze investors for a few dollars more.
Each is an expert in the con. But Fielder is deadpan and cold where Holmes is earnest and warm — and he’s been nominated for Emmys while, in May of 2023 when the film begins, she’s about to serve an 11-year sentence in federal prison. As the camera cuts between close-ups of his narrowed eyes and her big, blue ones, Fielder tries to suss whether he can trust the famous fibber to be honest with him. The showdown is riveting.
“You’re being real right now?” Fielder asks, dubious.
Holmes beams. “I’m always being real,” she swears with a smile.
Her charm hits Fielder in the gut. His face stays neutral yet you can see his own confidence bleed out across the screen.
Co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (“Primetime”), “You Can See Everything” is the closest Fielder has come to making a traditional documentary. A thrillingly cringe-tastic interviewer, he blurts out blunt questions like a bungee jumper leaping off a bridge, including asking Holmes’ romantic and business partner Billy Evans, the heir to a San Diego boutique hotel chain, whether it’s possible a woman convicted of fraud might be with him for his money.
At nearly three hours long, “You Can See Everything” won’t bore you for a minute. The hook is right there in the title, Fielder’s challenge to the audience: Here’s how Holmes held up to his scrutiny — do we think she’s telling the truth? But be alert. Fielder remains a trickster. One shot in particular proves you can see everything while being blind to what you’re actually watching.
In the first half of the movie, Holmes and Evans, the father of her two young children, give the small crew complete access to their lives during her last weeks of freedom, including inviting Fielder to sleep in their guest bedroom. It’s an act of “radical transparency,” Evans says. As evidence, there’s a fully nude shot of Evans in the shower, testifying to the intimacy the subjects claim they’re granting the team and the confidence they have that the documentary will make them look great. (Evans also boasts that he’s “excellent” in the sack.)
Holmes maintains both her innocence and her eerie smile, a rictus of empathy. She constantly nods, subliminally snake-charming the listener into a sense of agreement. That assessment might be fair or it might be her reputation making you over-analyze her tics. Doubling down, she even insists she’s never told a lie in her life — a claim that momentarily leaves Fielder at a loss for words.
Yet at times, Holmes really does appear to be sincere. Once she surrenders herself to the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas (where, in an unmentioned coincidence, Epstein collaborator Ghislane Maxwell is also incarcerated), the tone shifts into film noir as Fielder struggles to reconcile Elizabeth Holmes’ dual identities. Is she the sweet-natured scientist, the only version of her he’s ever met, or a femme fatale who may still be running a scam?
“It’s personal,” Fielder says of his fixation. How frustrating that he of all people — the dark prince of pranks — may be Holmes’ latest patsy. Composer Ari Balouzian borrows bits of Bernard Herrmann’s violin score from “Vertigo” while cinematographer David Bolen makes the audience hold its breath by framing an image of Fielder and Holmes like they might kiss.
When the movie’s style gets weird, that’s when Fielder is most in his wheelhouse. Stop reading now if you want to preserve the surprise. Micro-analyzing his encounters with Holmes, he reenacts them with an actor, Amanda Seyfried, whose emotional intensity blows into the film like a gust of fresh air. Seyfried, of course, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Holmes in the 2022 miniseries “The Dropout.” The twists to come, however, feel as much like last year’s naughty hit “The Housemaid,” the domestic thriller in which Seyfried played a shady wife with a marriage made of lies.
Evans initially seems to think they’re participating in a project closer to Netflix’s glossy portrait of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The couple doesn’t know much about humor, pop culture or Fielder himself. Fumbling to figure out what makes him tick, Evans attempts to neg the provocateur as someone who lacks the passion to think differently. (Evans may also be the person who used Holmes’ social media account to write a flattering post calling JD Vance “Lisan al-Gaib,” revealing he’s entirely missed the point of “Dune.”)
But thinking differently is Fielder’s awkward superpower. Sooner or later, all of his projects circle around to his concern that he’s simply wired to be unpleasant. His interactions with Holmes are pure cringe comedy, like when she starts to cry perhaps a bit on cue and he stiffly sputters, “Do you want, like, a tissue?” For the record, he brings her one.
As a viewer, the biggest strike against Holmes is this documentary’s very existence. Whether or not you think she’s guilty of fraud, she is about to be separated from her infant and toddler until they’re in grade school. Who on Earth would genuinely want Fielder, the human equivalent of a skunk, to crash their last moments with their loved ones as he does his darnedest to stink up the place?
Fielder is most comfortable as the film’s villain, shooting himself lurking in the couple’s house like “Halloween’s” Michael Myers. At times, his presence does feel monstrous. In one scene, he needles Evans about whether he thinks his soulmate has ever lied to him while Holmes is on the phone in the next room, tearing up as she asks how often she’ll be able to bathe in prison.
The film doesn’t drill into the technical details of Theranos beyond one dizzying scene where Fielder tries to pin Holmes down on exactly what she meant when she said her machine can run hundreds of different tests. She means it just as I would if I bragged I can benchpress a beer keg — that is, once I strength-train beyond my piddly 5 lb dumbbells.
Instead, it tilts into becoming a caper flick as Seyfried’s commitment to understanding her character’s motivation inspires the actor to invite herself along. The drama they uncover is psychological, as befits an era where Silicon Valley CEOs are closer to cult leaders than engineers, making their cash from being televangelists for their IPOs. And both are attuned to the moments when Evans lets his aggravation slip. One scene is a doozy.
Ultimately, suspicion reigns. “You Can See Everything” is an absorbing study of public presentation and private doubts, a documentary that asks more questions than it answers. I hope Fielder will smile and nod approvingly at me if I say I left the film distrusting him, too, especially Seyfried’s re-staging of a long monologue Holmes delivered in prison where recording devices aren’t allowed. Can we believe that Holmes really did say, “I’m tired of having other people speak for me,” or was that laugh line written by the master manipulator himself? I’m now as paranoid as he is — and what a pleasure.
Nathan Fielder would rather you not read this article. At least not until you’ve seen his new movie.
He has a point.
Now in theaters, “You Can See Everything,” the nearly three-hour documentary Fielder co-directed with filmmaker Lance Oppenheim about convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is full of head-spinning twists and turns best left unspoiled, and the filmmakers have gone to extreme lengths to keep them that way. At its secret premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches and warned that security guards with night-vision goggles would be watching for anyone trying to record the screening. Afterward, Fielder pleaded with the crowd to keep the film’s biggest surprises to themselves.
Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing company and sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison. Fielder and Oppenheim began filming her and longtime partner Billy Evans, an MIT graduate and heir to a family-owned San Diego hotel business, shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, gaining extraordinary access to the couple and their two young children.
Holmes and Evans welcomed the cameras, hoping they would help vindicate her. But the closer Fielder and Oppenheim got to the couple, the harder it became to distinguish candor from calculated performance. Fielder, whose series “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal” put real people through elaborate, often uncomfortable experiments, began to wonder whether the tables had been turned.
“I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced in this,” Fielder admitted during a post-screening Q&A at Telluride. “I don’t quite know what I went through.” He said he hoped audiences might help him make sense of the “glitchy feeling” it left in his head.
Having seen the film twice, we’re not entirely sure we can help him.
In deference to Fielder’s wishes, this is your last chance to turn back: Major spoilers follow. For those still with us, here are 10 of the film’s strangest moments — by no means the only ones — along with a few clues from Fielder himself about how they came to be.
Evans takes ’radical transparency’ too far
Evans has a theory about why the world sees his partner as a monster: Nobody really knows her. “In the absence of knowing somebody, it’s really easy to make them feel other and scary,” he tells the filmmakers. His proposed solution is “radical transparency” — a familiar Silicon Valley mantra with an ironic resonance given Theranos’ notorious culture of secrecy. The filmmakers are allowed virtually unlimited access to the family’s life, with Fielder even invited to move into their rented house in Del Mar, near San Diego. In one scene, Evans stands completely naked in the shower, brushing his teeth with the bathroom door wide open and the cameras rolling, as Fielder stands awkwardly nearby. At Telluride, Fielder, who had initially planned to stay behind the scenes, admitted he was still perplexed by the couple’s openness. “I’m a weird guy — why do they want me there?” he said. “That messed with my head a little bit.”
Fielder observes Holmes and her family in a scene from the documentary “You Can See Everything”
(A24)
Theranos, the sequel
A federal fraud conviction apparently hasn’t ended Holmes’ ambitions to revolutionize medical testing. Before heading to prison, she and Evans begin laying plans for a new venture involving lasers and artificial intelligence that Evans describes as “2.0” — a chance, he says, “to put the band back together and do it all again.” Holmes declares, “From wherever I am, I’m going to continue to work inventing, even if it’s inventing from a cage.”
Holmes claims she’s never told a lie
For someone convicted of defrauding investors, Holmes has a remarkably uncomplicated view of her own honesty. Asked by Fielder whether she’s ever told a lie in her life, she replies, “I don’t think so.” Pressed — surely she’s pretended to be sick to get out of a party? — she concedes she has, explaining that she thought he meant the criminal case against her. In a scene that became the centerpiece of the film’s teaser trailer, Holmes fixes Fielder with an unwavering stare. “Why would I deceive you?” she asks. “There’s no reason for me to do that.” When Fielder asks whether she’s being real with him, she doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m always being real.”
The Theranos device gets a second look
Holmes hauls out of storage the infamous Theranos device, the machine that helped bring down her company. “So this is the famous scam device,” Fielder says. “It is not a scam device,” Holmes replies. When she insists the machine can perform any medical test, Fielder finds himself drawn into an absurd debate over the meaning of the word “can.” Did she mean it could actually perform those tests, or that it theoretically would once the necessary chemistry had been developed? The man who has made a career out of baffling other people seems genuinely baffled himself, reduced to explaining the word “can” to the founder of Theranos.
Holmes and Evans enter federal court in 2022.
(Nic Coury / Associated Press)
Elizabeth Holmes meets Abbott and Costello
Still trying to make his point, Fielder turns to Abbott and Costello. He plays Holmes the classic “Who’s on First?” comedy routine — two people hopelessly talking past each other. Holmes watches politely and says she finds it funny. But she seems to have missed the central joke: The first baseman’s name is actually Who. “I didn’t pick it up,” she admits. Fielder’s attempts to explain the joke and why he showed it to her get him nowhere. Evans, watching the exchange, regards his wife’s difficulty following the joke as further evidence that her mind simply works differently from everyone else’s.
Fielder gives Holmes an escape kit
On the morning Holmes is due to report to prison, Fielder arrives with a parting gag gift: hair dye and glasses, in case she’d prefer to disguise herself and flee the country. Fielder is famous for excruciatingly awkward deadpan comedy, but Holmes’ parents are there, the family is preparing for an emotional goodbye and he seems to realize almost immediately that he has misjudged the situation. “I didn’t know your parents would be here,” he says, assuring everyone that it’s “just kind of like a joke.” The more he tries to explain himself, the more uncomfortable things become. “Maybe not appropriate for the moment,” he concedes.
Amanda Seyfried becomes a surprise co-star
Seyfried won an Emmy for playing Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout,” which Holmes had avoided watching for fear it would be too emotionally disturbing. Fielder persuades Holmes to watch it for the first time, on a laptop in the couple’s bed. She soon breaks down in tears and asks him to turn it off. Later, Fielder visits Seyfried at her apartment and shows her footage of Holmes watching her performance. So we watch Seyfried watch Holmes watch Seyfried playing Holmes as Fielder watches her. And things only get weirder from there.
At Telluride, Fielder said the filmmakers initially doubted Seyfried would want to participate. But after a brief phone call, she invited them over and agreed to be filmed. Neither side knew where things would lead. “It just actually evolved in that organic way, which was really exciting,” Fielder said.
Seyfried as Holmes in a scene from Hulu’s “The Dropout.”
( Beth Dubber / Hulu)
Seyfried plays detective
Seyfried soon finds herself reenacting Holmes’ conversations with Fielder as he tries to make sense of their encounters. She becomes so invested that she joins Fielder on a visit to Evans’ home, hoping she might get him to open up in ways Fielder can’t. “I feel like an undercover cop right now,” she says, clearly getting a rush. There, after meeting the couple’s children, she unexpectedly winds up on a prison phone call with Holmes herself. With only two minutes for the family to talk, Seyfried suddenly seems mortified to be intruding. “I’m so sorry — I don’t want to ruin your two minutes with your beautiful family,” she says. Fielder, naturally, has a camera running.
Evans takes control of the narrative
With Holmes behind bars, Evans seems determined to manage her public image himself. Armed with power of attorney, he takes over her verified X account, posting messages in her name, some of which sound nothing like the carefully controlled Holmes, including one telling another user to “f— off.” “There’s just so much trust that most things I don’t really consult her on,” Evans says at one point. “I know what she’d want.”
Evans’ attempts to steer the documentary itself begin even before Holmes reports to prison. In a meeting later reenacted in the film, after Holmes leaves the room, he raises the subject of money with Fielder, Oppenheim and executives from A24, the studio behind the film, demanding a share of the profits. Fielder says A24 reluctantly agreed, leaving him worried that the integrity of the project may have been compromised. When Holmes later insists she has no financial interest in the film, Fielder is taken aback. Either she’s “fully sincere,” he tells Seyfried, or “she honestly might be the most manipulative person that’s ever lived.” (The film notes at the end that Evans later changed his mind and decided not to accept payment.)
On Oct. 5, Holmes’ X account promoted the documentary with a tantalizing warning: “I really don’t think you are ready for this doc.” Whether that was Holmes speaking or Evans speaking for her is anyone’s guess.
Seyfried confronts Evans
Things turn ugly during that same visit to Evans’ home. A conversation about conjugal visits and Evans’ sex life gives way to a heated argument over his use of Holmes’ X account. Evans brings up the social media backlash Seyfried faced for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his shooting death, then attacks her portrayal of his partner in “The Dropout.” Soon he’s threatening vengeance against people he believes have wronged Holmes. “I’m going to ruin their lives,” he declares. Asked whose lives he means, Evans replies, “F—ing everyone. I’ve got vengeance in my heart.”
Later, away from Evans, Seyfried offers her own assessment: “He is bat— crazy.”
