ELIZABETH HOLMES LET NATHAN FIELDER FILM HER FOR THREE YEARS

Elizabeth Holmes let Nathan Fielder film her for three years, and A24 is putting the result in theaters on October 16. The movie is called You Can See Everything. Fielder directed it with Lance Oppenheim, it runs 174 minutes, and it premiered as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival on Sunday, September 6, with the trailer landing the same day. Nobody outside the festival knew it existed until it was already playing.

Thirty Four Days Before Prison

The official logline does most of the work. Thirty four days before she is sent to prison, it says, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move, and what begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a three year journey into the abyss.

Holmes reported to a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, in May 2023, sentenced to more than 11 years after a jury convicted her of defrauding Theranos investors. So the film opens in the last month of her life outside, with a newborn in the house, and then keeps going. The crew followed her for three years, through the sentence, which means most of the running time was shot while she was already inside.

That is the part that separates this from every Theranos project before it. The Dropout was a scripted series. The John Carreyrou book and the HBO documentary were built from the outside looking in. This one was invited in by Holmes herself, and the invitation went to the one filmmaker in America whose entire body of work is about people not knowing what they agreed to.

Fielder Asks If She Is Being Real

The trailer is short and it is uncomfortable on purpose. Fielder presses Holmes on whether she is being real with him while she holds her baby. Her answers, as heard in the clip: "I'm not that person. I can promise you that," and "I'm engaging with you as a human being." After the trailer went up, Holmes posted on X: "I'm always being real."

Anyone who watched Nathan for You or The Rehearsal knows the method. Fielder sits very still, says very little, and lets people talk themselves somewhere they did not plan to go. The Curse, the scripted series he made with Benny Safdie, was an A24 production, so this is not his first time inside the building. Oppenheim is the other half, and he is a real documentary director rather than a comedy partner. Some Kind of Heaven, his film about retirees in The Villages in Florida, and Ren Faire, his HBO series about a succession fight at a Texas renaissance festival, are both about people performing a life while the camera watches. Holmes is the logical end of that road.

A24 Kept It Secret Until Telluride

The rollout was a stunt in the A24 tradition. No announcement, no trade story, no festival listing. Telluride added a secret screening on September 6, the audience found out what it was when the lights went down, and A24 released the trailer and the October date before the credits had finished circulating online. Fielder and Oppenheim produced it with Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose and Jack Davis, under A24, To Be Formed and Blow Out Productions.

The first reviews are in and they are strong. Metacritic opened it at 92 from four critics. Owen Gleiberman at Variety wrote that it "overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness until it brings you into the enigmatic space where all those things meet." Variety's awards desk went further and said the film detonates the Oscar race, which for a three hour documentary about a convicted founder is not a sentence anyone expected to read in September. Early reviews also say Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy playing Holmes in The Dropout, appears in the film at length. The actress who played her, on camera, with her.

Theranos Is the Part Everyone Already Knows

For anyone who needs the short version: Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 at 19, claimed it could run hundreds of tests from a finger prick of blood, raised money at a $9 billion valuation, and put Walgreens locations and a board full of former cabinet secretaries behind a machine that did not work. The Wall Street Journal broke the story in 2015. A jury convicted her on four counts of fraud in January 2022. She was sentenced that November and reported to prison the following May.

The documentary does not need to relitigate any of that, and from the trailer it does not try. The question it is asking is smaller and harder: who is the person who did all of it, and can she tell you the truth about herself even when she wants to.

The A24 Pattern

This is also a very A24 move, and the archive shows the shape. The studio has won 21 Oscars with less than one percent of Hollywood's output, and it does it by picking a small number of films that people will argue about, then letting the argument do the marketing. Tony, its Anthony Bourdain biopic, opened at 94 percent with critics last month. The Yogurt Shop Murders, its true crime series, picked up two Emmy nominations. A three hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary made by the most unsettling comedian alive is exactly the kind of bet the company exists to make.

Prediction: the documentary nomination is the floor, the Best Picture campaign is the point, and the loudest argument of awards season will be about whether Holmes played Fielder or Fielder played Holmes. The film's title suggests they both already know the answer.