What Should You Watch Before Fielder's Holmes Film?
Nathan Fielder's first feature is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and it opens in theaters on Friday, October 16. You Can See Everything, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim for A24, runs 174 minutes and was made inside the house Elizabeth Holmes shared with her partner Billy Evans. In April 2023 the couple invited the crew to live with them and their children for the 34 days before Holmes began her federal prison sentence. The filmmakers then followed them for three years.
Almost nobody has seen it. It played as a secret screening at Telluride on September 6, where attendees surrendered their phones at the door. The ten critics counted on Rotten Tomatoes all liked it, and Metacritic sits at 95. The trailer arrived last Wednesday, September 23.
That leaves under three weeks and a pile of possible homework. Most of the Theranos homework can go. The one thing you need to have seen is a Fielder show, and it has nothing to do with blood tests.
Why the Holmes story is the smaller part
Fielder told Variety the crew knew they had a film when its members started disagreeing about what was actually happening in the house. He had read John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood and assumed the case had been covered to death. What pulled him in was Holmes's own point of view after she retreated from public life. The plan was for him to stay behind the camera. His encounters with Holmes and Evans were so strange that they went into the cut.
Owen Gleiberman's Variety review calls the result "a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus" that "overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness until it brings you into the enigmatic space where all those things meet." Every word of that describes Fielder's television better than it describes a true-crime film.
The essential one: The Rehearsal, season one
If you watch one thing, make it the first season of The Rehearsal on HBO. Fielder helps ordinary people practise hard moments with replica sets and hired actors, and then, across several episodes, co-parents a fake son with a participant named Angela while the line between rehearsal and life gets blurry for everyone, him included. It is the clearest preview of a man who can no longer tell whether he is observing a performance or giving one. That, by every early account, is what the Holmes film is about. The second season, built around a replica of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport and pilot communication, is great too, but it is optional for this purpose.
The watch order
- Tonight: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Alex Gibney's 2019 HBO documentary is a companion to Bad Blood and lays out the rise and fall in one sitting, through whistleblowers, journalists and deceived investors. Fielder's film assumes you know this. One sitting and you do.
- This week: The Rehearsal, season one. The essential.
- Next weekend: Nathan for You, the Comedy Central show that ran from 2013 to 2017. If time is short, watch only the series finale, "Finding Frances," which Errol Morris called "unfathomably great." It is the best proof that his business-advice pranks were always a way into something sincere.
- If you have room: The Curse, his 2023 Showtime series with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone, about a newly married couple co-starring on their own HGTV show, Fliplanthropy, while an alleged curse unsettles their marriage. It is the darkest thing he has made about performance and self-image.
- For the co-director: Oppenheim's Some Kind of Heaven, his first feature, which premiered at Sundance in 2020. It follows residents of The Villages in Florida, the world's largest retirement community, and shows his patience with people chasing happiness on camera.
- Only if you are a completist: The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu miniseries that won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Holmes. It is good television. It will also put a performance of Holmes in your head, and this film is about the woman who was already performing.
Oppenheim's first narrative feature, Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, opened last Friday, September 25, if you want to see his other film first.
What to expect in the room
The filmmakers could not get the people from Holmes's past to join in. "People did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her," Fielder has said. That leaves three hours with the couple, the crew and Fielder. Walk in fresh on Holmes and fluent in Fielder.
