What happens when the most famous fraud of Silicon Valley invites a comedian to live in her house for the last 34 days before prison? You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, answers that question across 174 minutes, then keeps going for three more years after Elizabeth Holmes walks into a federal prison camp in Texas.
What starts as a domestic portrait turns into a detective story about her partner, Billy Evans, and ends with Amanda Seyfried playing Holmes again.
Table of Contents
At a Glance
You Can See Everything (2026) is a documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted Theranos founder. The crew lived with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two children for 34 days before she reported to prison in May 2023.
In that first half, Holmes insists she never lied, cannot follow Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”, hauls the old Edison blood-testing device out of the garage, and pitches investors on what Evans calls “Theranos 2.0.” After a two-year time jump, the film turns on Evans: he is raising the kids in Austin, building a new blood-testing startup, running Holmes’s X account, and growing hostile to the cameras.
Fielder suspects manipulation and switches to his Rehearsal-style methods, including scripted recreations with Amanda Seyfried reprising Holmes from The Dropout.
The ending refuses to settle whether anyone, including the filmmakers, ever saw the “real” Holmes.
Quick Facts: You Can See Everything (2026)
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Directors | Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim |
| Subjects / Cast | Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, Nathan Fielder, Amanda Seyfried |
| Producers | Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose, Jack Davis |
| Cinematography | David Bolen |
| Editing | Adam Locke-Norton |
| Music | Ari Balouzian |
| Runtime | 174 minutes |
| Distributor | A24 |
| World premiere | September 6, 2026, secret screening, 53rd Telluride Film Festival |
| NYFF screening | October 1, 2026, Alice Tully Hall, 64th New York Film Festival |
| US theatrical release | October 16, 2026 |
| MPA rating | R, for language and some graphic nudity |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 100% (early reviews) |
| Metacritic | 95/100, “universal acclaim” (early reviews) |
Audience recommendations
Best for:
- Viewers who loved Fielder’s The Rehearsal or The Curse and want that same uneasy blend of comedy and discomfort
- Anyone who read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood or watched The Dropout and wondered what Holmes is like off the record
- Documentary fans interested in how filmmakers shape, and get shaped by, their subjects
Not for:
- Viewers who want a clear, investigative account of the Theranos fraud. Several critics note that the victims get little screen time
- Anyone hoping for a redemption arc or a confession. Neither arrives
- Viewers who need a tidy ending. The film is built to leave you unsure
Who Is Elizabeth Holmes? The Background You Need
Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos, a blood-testing company that claimed its device, the Edison, could run a wide range of tests from a few drops of blood. The technology never worked as promised.
On January 3, 2022, a federal jury convicted her on four counts: three of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was sentenced in November 2022 to 135 months, or 11 years and 3 months, and ordered to pay restitution of $452 million jointly with her former partner and Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. She reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, in Bryan, Texas, on May 30, 2023.
Billy Evans is an heir to Evans Hotels, the San Diego family company founded in 1953 that runs the Bahia Resort Hotel, the Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa, and the Lodge at Torrey Pines. According to SanDiegoVille, he graduated from MIT in 2015 and worked at LinkedIn and Luminar Technologies.
He and Holmes met at a Fleet Week charity event in 2017, while she was already under investigation, and they have two children: a son born in July 2021 and a second child born in early 2023.
That is the world Fielder and Oppenheim walked into.
How the Film Came to Exist
According to Wikipedia’s production account, Fielder and Oppenheim learned through a mutual acquaintance that Holmes was looking for a documentarian.
Fielder had read Bad Blood, Carreyrou’s 2018 book, but was curious about how Holmes saw herself after she stepped out of public view. A24 let the project run with no deadline and no obligation to finish it. Fielder originally planned to stay behind the camera.
His exchanges with Holmes and Evans proved so strange that he ended up on screen. Most people connected to Holmes declined to take part.
The film was shot in secret. A24’s description calls it a three-year journey, while the New York Film Festival synopsis says it was made over four years. Its existence only became public at the Telluride surprise screening, which was a no-phones event.
You Can See Everything Plot Summary
Part One: The 34 Days in Del Mar (Spring 2023)
The film opens in the final weeks of Holmes’s freedom. She and Evans are living in a beachside house in Del Mar, in San Diego County, with their two small children. Holmes has given birth only a few months earlier. Fielder moves into a guest house on the property, and the crew films from morning until night, according to NBC Bay Area’s report on the NYFF Q&A.
The couple frame the project as a chance to show the world who Holmes really is. In Rolling Stone‘s account, Evans tells the filmmakers that the public turned her into a monster because “no one knows who she is.”
Holmes insists she never lied. The early interviews are polite, slow, and maddening. Fielder asks Holmes, in the plainest language he can find, whether she understands that what she did was immoral and illegal. She does not accept the premise.
In the trailer, she tells him she has nothing to deceive him about and asks, “Why would I deceive you?” The World of Reel write-up of the trailer notes her wide, fixed stare and a tear that seems to appear on command. RogerEbert.com critic Tomris Laffly describes Fielder laying out the facts again and again in simpler and simpler terms, with Holmes never budging.
The Dropout screening. Holmes raises a dispute over a quote in The New York Times about how she was portrayed in The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series in which Amanda Seyfried played her.
The filmmakers then sit down with Holmes and Evans to watch the show together. Rolling Stone’s David Fear sums up the result briefly: it does not go well. Dork’s Oliver Green describes Holmes objecting to Seyfried’s portrayal while Fielder films her reaction. This scene matters later, because Seyfried does not stay on the TV screen.
“Who’s on First?” In one of the scenes critics mention most, Fielder plays the classic Abbott and Costello routine for the couple. Neither of them knows it. Holmes cannot follow the wordplay and needs it explained, according to The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, as quoted by SFist, described her as apparently truly baffled.
Fielder appears to be using the bit as a mirror: a comedy sketch built on two people using the same words to mean different things, shown to a woman whose fraud trial turned on what her claims about the Edison did and did not mean.
Evans in charge. Evans quickly becomes the second lead. Laffly describes him as controlling and arrogant, dominating Holmes in domestic situations. He tells the filmmakers that Holmes is “weird” and does not process information the way other people do, but frames this as part of her brilliance, according to The Playlist.
The film, in Ellwood’s reading, invites viewers to compare Evans with Balwani, the older partner who was also convicted of fraud.
“Were you worried she was scamming you?” Fielder asks Evans directly why he entered a relationship with a woman who was already under investigation and, in Fortune’s paraphrase, probably on her way to jail.
In an exchange reported by International Business Times UK, Fielder asks whether Evans worried Holmes was scamming him. Evans answers, “100%, but what did she have to gain from me?” When Fielder raises his family’s wealth, Evans suggests there are many different levels of wealth. Asked separately whether he ever suspected her of lying to him, he says never. The two answers sit side by side, unresolved.
Odd domestic details. Laffly notes the couple sleep on beds without mattresses. Den of Geek’s David Crow describes staged-feeling domestic scenes and one especially unsettling moment: Holmes undergoing a hologram scan so her children will have something to remember her by while she is in prison.
The Edison comes out of the garage. According to Fortune’s Emma Hinchliffe, the couple retrieve the discredited Theranos blood-testing machine from their garage. Holmes still believes in it. In a key interview, Fielder presses her on whether the device ever worked. Through a series of word games, she effectively concedes that it did not, while never saying so outright, as The Playlist describes it.
Dork’s review says she slides from the actual device to the idea behind it so smoothly that a listener can lose track of the question.
Theranos 2.0. The most startling material in the first half is that Holmes and Evans are not winding down. They are working the phones with potential investors, pitching a revival. Evans calls it “Theranos 2.0,” a phrase reported by both Rolling Stone and Den of Geek. Holmes is days from prison and still selling.
Prison. The first half ends with Holmes leaving her children and reporting to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023.
Part Two: The Time Jump and the Turn Toward Billy (2025)
The film then jumps forward about two years. The Daily Beast‘s Nick Schager and The Playlist both describe this as a hard break. Holmes now exists mostly as a voice, limited to short, monitored phone calls from prison.
The camera turns to Evans. He has moved to Austin, where he is raising the children and building a new diagnostics company. The Playlist calls it strikingly similar to Theranos, with Evans claiming it will develop disease-testing technology. In real life, Evans launched a company called Haemanthus in 2025; International Business Times UK reports it uses Raman spectroscopy and AI, and SanDiegoVille reports that Holmes was said to be advising from prison.
Evans is also running Holmes’s X account, posting in her name while she is incarcerated, which Fortune notes the film shows him managing aggressively. NPR, as cited by Forbes, has separately reported that Evans posts on her behalf.
Here the tone shifts. Ellwood writes that Evans becomes increasingly unhinged. Crow notes Evans grows reluctant to participate and keeps stepping in on Holmes’s behalf.
Laffly calls him, by the second half, “an even worse kind of villain” than he first appeared. Fielder starts to wonder what really happened during the month he lived with them.
In Rolling Stone’s phrasing, Fielder “smells a rat,” and the film becomes a mix of melodrama, detective story, and heist film, including a dispute over who controls the project itself.
The A24 negotiation (reported, not fully confirmed). Two outlets, Lifestyle Asia and Tech Times, report that the film includes footage of Evans negotiating his own share of the profits with A24 executives, apparently without Holmes knowing. Tech Times attributes this to critics at the Telluride premiere.
It does fit what Fielder has said in public: Forbes Australia quotes him saying communication with Evans broke down near the end and that Evans tried to exert a lot of control over the process.
Part Three: The Reconstruction, and Seyfried Returns
With Holmes behind bars and Evans no longer cooperating, Fielder does what he does best. The Daily Beast reports that he brings in the toolkit from The Rehearsal: scripts, impersonations, and dramatic recreations. Dork’s review says this puts Fielder in a more exposed position, because he is now building situations rather than watching them, and by the end his own ethics become the more disturbing subject.
The big twist: Amanda Seyfried plays Holmes again. The actress whose performance Holmes objected to in Part One comes back as Elizabeth Holmes. According to SFist, citing Variety, Seyfried appears around the midpoint to dramatize and re-enact parts of Holmes’s prison life, including her phone calls.
Couch Soup reports her role is to re-enact conversations, fill in the gaps, and complete the arc the filmmakers could no longer film directly. The Wikipedia entry also lists substantial footage with Seyfried.
NBC Bay Area described the recreations as featuring “an A-list star” without naming her, which shows how hard the festivals worked to keep this quiet.
The irony is the point. Holmes spent part of her last free month disputing how a Hollywood actress played her. By the end of the film, that actress is the only version of Holmes the camera can reach.
The withheld reveal. The Playlist mentions a “jaw-dropping” appearance by a familiar face from Holmes’s orbit and refuses to name the person, out of respect for the filmmakers’ request. Fortune also says there is another twist that A24 asked press not to share before release. As of this writing, I could not find a reputable outlet that names this person or describes this twist, so I will not guess. This article will be updated once the film is in theaters.
The Ending, Explained
Based on what critics have reported, the film does not end with a confession, a verdict, or a clean resolution. It ends in doubt.
Holmes never admits the fraud. Through to the end, she maintains she committed no crime. Schager quotes her line “I did not commit any crime.”
Evans is the one who comes apart on camera. Ellwood suggests Evans may have walked into his own self-made character assassination, which is to say the person most eager to control the story is the one it damages most.
The filmmakers admit they are not sure what they saw. David Fear compares the conclusion to a magic trick, leaving viewers unsure whether they have been watching a pair of master illusionists. Next Best Picture’s J Don Birnam puts it this way: the film shows everything, yet makes clear “how little we may ever truly know.”
Fielder himself is still unsettled. At the NYFF Q&A, he said, “I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through.” Oppenheim added that crew members could not even agree on what happened during mundane moments.
So what does the title mean? Holmes and Evans offered total access, the promise that you can see everything. The film’s argument is that total access does not equal truth. A camera can sit in someone’s kitchen for 34 days and still not know whether it is watching a person, a performance, or both. By the time an actress is standing in for the subject, the documentary has become a record of how a story about Holmes gets built, and who gets to build it.
What Happened After You Can See Everything? Where Is Elizabeth Holmes Now?
Still in prison. As of late September 2026, Holmes is at Federal Prison Camp Bryan. In a post on her X account on September 28, 2026, she said she had served 1,216 days and wrote, “I was silenced for a long time. And then imprisoned.” (Variety Australia)
Earlier release. Variety Australia reports a judge approved her transfer to a halfway house in Austin starting August 23, 2027, with a scheduled release date of February 22, 2030. Wikipedia lists an earlier projection of 2032, so the dates have shifted over time.
Clemency bid. Forbes reports that the US Pardon Attorney’s Office confirmed in January 2026 that Holmes applied for a commutation from President Trump. No decision had been announced as of Forbes’s September 8 report.
Neither Holmes nor Evans had seen the finished film as of that Forbes report.
You Can See Everything Analysis
What critics agree on
The early consensus is strong. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama.” Den of Geek gave it 5 out of 5 and called it “the strangest documentary you’ll ever see.” The Daily Beast named it the year’s best film.
Laffly at RogerEbert.com gave it 3.5 stars and said it might point toward a new kind of mainstream non-fiction filmmaking.
The reasons are consistent across reviews. The access is extraordinary. The pacing of Fielder’s interviews lets silence do the work. And the structure keeps changing shape, so a film that begins as observational ends as something close to a thriller about its own production.
What critics push back on
Not every review is uncritical. Dork’s Oliver Green argues that the near three-hour runtime distorts perspective, with Theranos’s victims receiving very little attention compared with Holmes’s household. Next Best Picture also points to blind spots around the real victims and the consequences for the children.
These are fair complaints. The patients who received unreliable test results are not the subject of this film, and a viewer who comes to it without knowing the Theranos story may leave with a lopsided picture.
There is also the ethics question the film raises about itself. Fielder is no neutral observer. He moves into the house, designs tests like the Abbott and Costello screening, and in the second half stages recreations. Dork argues that by the end, his choices are the more troubling subject. Whether that self-exposure counts as honesty or as a clever way to stay in control of the story is a question viewers will have to answer for themselves.
Our take
We have not yet seen the full film; this guide is built from the published record and reviews ahead of the October 16 release. On that record, what stands out is how the film turns access into its own subject. Earlier Holmes stories, from Carreyrou’s reporting to HBO’s The Inventor to The Dropout, asked what happened at Theranos.
This one asks what happens when a fraud who never conceded anything gets to perform her innocence for a willing camera, and the camera starts to wonder whether it is being played. That is a sharper question than another retelling of the collapse.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Unprecedented, intimate access to Holmes in her last weeks of freedom
A structure that keeps shifting, from domestic portrait to detective story to staged reconstruction
Fielder’s deadpan interviewing, which lets contradictions surface without commentary
A bold use of Amanda Seyfried that turns The Dropout into part of the story
An honest admission from the filmmakers that they do not fully understand what they captured
Weaknesses
174 minutes is long, and some critics feel it
Theranos victims are largely absent
The filmmaker’s own interventions blur the line between documenting and manufacturing
Viewers new to the case may need to read up first
If you like films that leave the final meaning open, see our Million Dollar Baby ending explained and Project Hail Mary ending explained.
For more essential viewing, our list of 101 best films you need to see and 25 best iconic films that shaped cinema are good places to start. For reading on how ideas and institutions shape public life, try our 100 best nonfiction books that changed the world.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is You Can See Everything (2026) about?
It is an A24 documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that follows Elizabeth Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their children during the 34 days before Holmes entered federal prison in May 2023, then continues for years afterward as the focus shifts to Evans and the filmmaking itself.
Is Elizabeth Holmes actually in You Can See Everything?
Yes. Holmes appears on camera throughout the first half, filmed at her home in Del Mar, California. After she enters prison, she is heard mainly through phone calls, and Amanda Seyfried re-enacts parts of her prison life.
Is Amanda Seyfried in You Can See Everything?
Yes. Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, reprises the role in dramatized recreations in the second half, according to Variety’s review as reported by SFist.
What happens at the end of You Can See Everything?
Holmes never admits to fraud, Evans becomes the film’s antagonist as he builds a new blood-testing company and resists the filmmakers, and Fielder turns to staged recreations. The film ends without resolving whether the couple were sincere or performing. At least one late twist has been withheld by critics at A24’s request until release.
What is Theranos 2.0 in the documentary?
It is the phrase Billy Evans uses for the couple’s effort to revive Theranos-style blood testing. In the film they pitch investors before Holmes goes to prison, and Evans later builds a new diagnostics company in Austin. In real life, Evans launched a company called Haemanthus in 2025.
How long is You Can See Everything?
174 minutes, or 2 hours and 54 minutes.
When is You Can See Everything released?
It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, 2026, screened at the New York Film Festival on October 1, 2026, and opens in US theaters on October 16, 2026.
Why is You Can See Everything rated R?
The MPA rated it R for language and some graphic nudity. A24 has not publicly explained which scenes earned the nudity descriptor.
Is Elizabeth Holmes still in prison?
Yes, as of September 2026 she is at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas. Variety Australia reports she is scheduled to move to an Austin halfway house in August 2027, with release set for February 2030.
Did Billy Evans try to control the documentary?
Nathan Fielder has said publicly that communication with Evans broke down near the end of production and that Evans tried to exert a lot of control over the process.
Conclusion
You Can See Everything is less a film about what Elizabeth Holmes did than about what happens when you try to see her clearly. It gives you the kitchen, the kids, the garage, the investor calls, and the “Who’s on First?” blank stare.
Then it takes Holmes away, hands the story to a partner who wants to steer it, and finally hands her role back to an actress. By the end, the title reads as a promise and a warning. You can see everything. That does not mean you will know what you saw.
