PolicyEntertainmentScienceCan you see everything?What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.by Elizabeth LopattoOct 20, 2026, 6:30 PM UTCShareGiftWhat are we looking at, and who wants us to see it? | Image: A24PolicyEntertainmentScienceCan you see everything?What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.by Elizabeth LopattoOct 20, 2026, 6:30 PM UTCShareGiftElizabeth Lopatto is a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.This review contains spoilers.I have heard it said that of all the drugs, fame is the most addictive. For Elizabeth Holmes, at least, I am willing to believe that is true.
It is the only explanation for You Can See Everything, a movie that is, at its core, about several varieties of manipulation.Holmes, as the CEO of Theranos, was a business-world celebrity: a woman who’d built a private company valued at $9 billion around a miniaturized blood testing platform that supposedly let people test just a drop of blood for a variety of ailments. She had a deal with Walgreens, speaking gigs, a New Yorker profile, a cover story in Fortune; Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch was among her investors and Henry Kissinger sat on Theranos’ board. The company crumbled after John Carreyrou, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, broke the story in 2015 that Theranos wasn’t using its own technology to run most of its blood tests. Only 15 tests were run on the Theranos machine, and insiders had doubts about their accuracy.In 2021, I spent four months sitting through Holmes’ trial for fraud.
She was found guilty of one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud. The evidence supporting that verdict was damning: forged memos that appeared to be from pharmaceutical companies Theranos had done testing for; recordings of Holmes lying about doing testing in Afghanistan with the American military and claiming Theranos could perform more than 1,000 tests on its proprietary machines, even though only 200 were listed as options on the website because “we have operationalized certain tasks, expecting a certain set of ordering patterns.”Fielder got sucked in anywaySeveral Theranos employees testified they’d told her their misgivings about the accuracy of the proprietary tests, only to be summarily dismissed. They faced harassment and retaliation as a result of talking to Carreyrou — nastygrams from Theranos lawyers, bizarre investigations from Fusion GPS, and private investigators tailing them. In one case, Holmes nearly destroyed the relationship between a man and his grandfather. (You can read the grandson’s review of the movie here.)These specifics do not appear in You Can See Everything.
That isn’t its project; the film assumes you have some familiarity with the Theranos scandal. Holmes approached A24, the studio behind the film, to see if it would be willing to do a documentary; cringe comedian Nathan Fielder found out and asked if he could call her. Fielder and his team filmed Holmes’ last month of freedom, and then stayed in contact for two more years as she served her sentence. The question the film poses is: Can you trust her?
This is not, if you were immersed in the details of the criminal case, a question. (No. Obviously.) What is fascinating is that Fielder got sucked in anyway.Early in the film, Fielder asks Holmes if she has chosen him to tell the story because he isn’t a science journalist, and it’ll be easier to get one over on him. She says she sees it as a human story. She feels she has been misunderstood.
She isn’t the fraudster people — like me, I suppose — made her out to be. She wasn’t lying to anyone. She really believed in her invention. As she says this, she is wide-eyed, making eye contact with Fielder.
Her face is placid, even peaceful. She appears to be fully convinced. At one point, she insists she’s never told a lie at all, not once in her life.It is a spectacular performance. I might even have believed some of what she was saying, if I hadn’t seen hundreds of pages of documents from her trial.
At one point, she tells Fielder that when she said her machine “can” perform all those tests, she meant the machine can, if you make the hypothetical chemistry for the tests, perform the tests. A future-tense “can,” if you will. (And a somewhat tautological one.) This was not an entirely novel talking point; in fact, it was the reason that one day of the trial contained a grammar lesson.Onscreen, Fielder wants to believe herFielder’s response was to try to take this future-tense “can” seriously, or as seriously as he can, by showing Holmes “Who’s on first,” a 1945 comedy routine by Abbott and Costello that she professes not to have heard of. (It is so famous that my first contact with it was my father doing both sides of the routine verbatim when I was perhaps five. The routine is almost 10 years older than he is.) Holmes laughs along, then when asked what’s funny, appears to draw a blank. She is seemingly unable to produce the name of the first baseman.I find it difficult to believe that a grown woman cannot comprehend a comedy routine that I understood as an ordinary five-year-old.
But Holmes has to commit to not understanding it, because to admit she understands it is to admit she understands why the future-tense “can” misled people. Her partner, Billy Evans, offers that her mind doesn’t work like other people’s.This is true, in its way. One of the reasons that Fielder, a master manipulator himself, winds up so entangled in Holmes’ story is that he isn’t going to the written records. The only meaningful appearance of Theranos-era Holmes is a brief recorded clip of her talking to journalist Roger Parloff, which is what kicks off the “can” discussion.
In the absence of any kind of permanent record, talking to someone who appears perfectly confident and candid while they lie is a mind-bending experience. Onscreen, Fielder wants to believe her. He doesn’t, not really. But he wants to.Later, we do see text: an iMessage from Holmes to Fielder, the line from which the title is drawn, reassuring him that he can move in with the couple.
He can see everything. It is, in context, a normal use of the word “can.”Fielder and Holmes are often in very close physical proximity. In some scenes, they appear to be about to kissBecause I was not preoccupied with the same thing as onscreen Fielder — trying to figure out whether Holmes was “fully sincere” or “the most manipulative person who ever lived” — I was watching, instead, how the manipulation works. In the early shots, Fielder is lurking awkwardly in the background, or around the corner from Holmes in a shot.
But Holmes draws him in, asking him what he thinks, engaging him in conversation. Holmes’ penchant for eye contact does a lot of it; at one point, Fielder asks her how she and Billy met, and whether she was flirting with him. She was. He asks how she flirts.
She says, while holding eye contact with Fielder, by holding eye contact at length. Fielder and Holmes are often in very close physical proximity, which is emphasized by Lance Oppenheim’s (and Fielder’s) direction. In some scenes, they appear to be about to kiss.This is notable largely because of who Holmes operates best on: men. She was surrounded by them at Theranos — the only girl in the boys’ club.
But the seduction here isn’t the femme fatale style of noir movies. It’s eye contact, active listening, physical proximity. She is giving Fielder — and, I presume, the other men in her life — the feeling of being fully heard and understood.On top of that, there’s a second level of seduction operating: the promise that you, the person she is talking to, are uniquely qualified to understand her, because you are specia
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