You Can See Everything premise: Story, Scope & Themes

The You Can See Everything premise centers on Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans inviting Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to document their lives shortly before Holmes begins serving a federal prison sentence. What begins as a limited period of access develops into a three-year observational project involving the couple, their children, the filmmakers, and the unresolved public image surrounding Holmes.

The documentary is not presented as a conventional retelling of the Theranos scandal. Instead, it places Holmes inside an intimate domestic environment and asks how much can be understood through direct access. The filmmakers observe conversations, household routines, and moments in which different people interpret the same situation in conflicting ways.

The film premiered as a secret screening at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on September 6, 2026. A24 is scheduled to release it theatrically in the United States on October 16, 2026. The official film overview identifies the documentary as Nathan Fielder’s feature directorial debut.

Video Highlights:

• Elizabeth Holmes became the public face of Theranos before its collapse.
• The documentary begins shortly before Holmes reports to federal prison.
• Billy Evans serves as an important connection between Holmes and the filmmakers.
• Fielder’s on-camera presence becomes part of the film’s unusual structure.

The documentary’s starting point is deliberately specific: Holmes and Evans open their home to the filmmakers during the 34 days before Holmes begins her prison sentence. The initial access gives the project a clear narrative boundary, but the production continues after Holmes enters prison and eventually covers three years.

This structure allows the documentary to move between immediate domestic pressure and longer-term observation. The household is not simply a backdrop. It becomes the main setting in which Holmes’s behavior, Evans’s responses, and the crew’s changing interpretations are placed side by side.

The project also develops through uncertainty. Fielder and Oppenheim reportedly realized they had a compelling subject when crew members disagreed about what was occurring in the house. That disagreement becomes part of the film’s conceptual foundation: viewers are encouraged to notice how perspective shapes any account of Holmes.

The film’s narrative focus rests on three connected figures: Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, and Nathan Fielder. Lance Oppenheim shares directing duties with Fielder, while the film’s access depends heavily on the relationship between Holmes, Evans, and the crew.

Holmes is the subject viewers are most likely to recognize, but the documentary’s structure places her in relation to the people around her. Evans becomes an essential intermediary because he remains connected to Holmes while also communicating with the filmmakers. Fielder’s role changes from observer to participant when the interactions inside the home become too unusual to remain entirely off camera.

The film also gains meaning from people who are absent. The directors contacted several individuals who knew Holmes or worked with her, but many declined to appear. Their absence reinforces the documentary’s narrow access point and keeps the household at the center of the story.

Several themes organize the film’s approach. The first is the tension between public identity and private behavior. Holmes became known for a carefully constructed image during Theranos’s rise, but the documentary observes her in a family home rather than on a business stage.

A second theme is performance. Fielder and Oppenheim are interested in the possibility that everyday behavior can contain both genuine emotion and presentation. The film does not need to provide a simple answer about whether Holmes is performing. Instead, it places viewers inside situations where sincerity, strategy, discomfort, and confusion may overlap.

A third theme is interpretation. Crew members disagree about what they are seeing, and Fielder has described continuing uncertainty about his experience. This gives the documentary a self-aware quality: the filmmakers are not positioned as all-knowing guides. Their difficulty understanding the household becomes part of the story.

Many documentaries about Theranos would naturally focus on the company’s technology, investors, whistleblowers, investigations, and court proceedings. You Can See Everything begins after much of that public history has already been widely discussed. Its distinctive approach is to investigate the person at the center of the story through prolonged access rather than a conventional evidence-driven reconstruction.

That does not mean the Theranos background is irrelevant. Holmes’s past explains why the filmmakers’ access is so unusual and why ordinary domestic scenes carry additional weight. The film’s premise depends on the contrast between a globally recognized scandal and the relatively small space of a family home.

The project also differs through tone. Fielder’s involvement introduces an observational and potentially awkward style, while Oppenheim’s documentary work supports a more sustained examination of behavior. The result is positioned between a character study, a reality-based experiment, and an account of filmmaking under uncertain conditions.