You Can See Everything, the documentary about the fraudster who wants to rewrite her story

“What demon drives a disgraced figure like Elizabeth Holmes to welcome the director and crew of a documentary?” asks Henry Roberts in The Guardian. Previous examples include films about Lance Armstrong, Imelda Marcos and Anthony Weiner. The latest case concerns Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, who was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years in prison for fraud estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars (a sum she is also required to repay).

The crux of the matter was called Theranos. It was a technology that held endless promise: capable of detecting all manner of ailments, including various types of cancer. All it took was a drop of blood taken from a finger, like a haemoglobin test. Among those duped—though it seems incredible—are ABC News, The New York Times and NBC News, the very organisations that are supposed to verify the news. The fraudster ended up in prison in Bryan, Texas. Her sentence has since been significantly reduced.

The documentary is titled "You Can See Everything", directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. It is better to call it a film, given the large audience that immediately flocked to cinemas, grossing $15 million in its first weekend across the US and Canada – it runs for a full three hours. Metacritic, which collects and rates reviews, gave it a score of 99 out of 100 – to put that into perspective: Christopher Nolan’s “Odysee” scored 88/100, whilst Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” (the most heavily criticised film of recent months, amongst those with artistic pretensions, achieved a 46 per cent approval rating).

“A modern masterpiece of deceit”: this is the title of The Guardian’s 5-star review. In other words: a modern masterpiece on the art of the con. Wisdom which, if we are to believe House of Games – the unrivalled 1987 film written and directed by David Mamet – stems from the fact that “every day a fool is born and two crooks to swindle him”. We are quoting from memory; if you wish to verify, Apple TV offers it for a rental fee of $3.99, while purchasing costs a few dollars more.

Let’s take a look at this diabolical duo: alongside Elizabeth Holmes is her husband Billy Evans, and their two young children. Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary was filmed before they went to prison, precisely for fraud. It was very well received; even notorious fraudsters have an insatiable desire to make the world understand ‘who they really are’. At that time, they were working on ‘Theranos 2.0’: what better opportunity to secure some publicity?

The question remains. Given the circumstances, was Elizabeth Holmes revealing the truth about herself, or will viewers see in the documentary yet another character fabricated for the occasion? Nathan Fielder asks her this, and she swears, ‘I’ll tell the truth’. A single lie can prevent a thousand more.