Nearly 2 million people watched You Can See Everything this weekend, and the project’s path to that audience runs through Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim and A24. What began as a documentary investigation into Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans has turned into one of the more closely watched nonfiction releases of the moment, in part because the film was never just about Holmes. It was also about whether anyone could make sense of what happened around her.
Fielder told a New York Film Festival audience last month that he was still struggling to this day to understand what he went through, a line that now hangs over the film’s release. That is why people are searching for You Can See Everything review now: the weekend audience was large, but the interest is really in how the project came together and what it is trying to say about Holmes, Evans and the people making the film.
The chain of events was almost absurdly direct. Holmes called A24 looking for exposure, the company met with her, and the sides could not reach an agreement at first. Around the same time, Oppenheim was in LA from NYC when he and Fielder were at the Magic Castle and someone in the audience shouted Holmes’ name during an improv bit. Oppenheim later told Fielder he had heard A24 was mulling a Holmes movie, and Fielder eventually called the company’s NY offices himself. The project that emerged from those calls became You Can See Everything.
A24’s role matters because the company was involved early, even before its doc division was shelved. Emily Osborne was laid off last year when that happened, but she remains an executive producer on the film, a sign that the project outlived the corporate shake-up around it. The broader backdrop is legal as much as creative: California struck down its Son of Sam Law a number of years back, and that law is the kind of rule that once barred convicted criminals from profiting from their crimes. That issue sits close to any effort involving Holmes and Evans.
What keeps the story from settling into a clean origin tale is that Fielder says he and Oppenheim disagreed over nearly everything that was happening between Holmes and Billy Evans, even while the film presents the work as a shared investigation. Billy Evans has also described the point of the project more simply, saying, “It was to have people see who she is.” That is the unresolved core of You Can See Everything: a film about revelation that is still shaped by disagreement, and a release that arrives with the central question of who gets to define Holmes still very much open.
