A nearly three-hour documentary about Silicon Valley’s most notorious scammer, filmed in secret and released without first interviewing its author, has been the top-grossing film in the US for several weeks. In Spain we had to wait until February, but its distributor Avalon has decided to push the release of ‘You Can See Everything’ to December 25 in Spanish cinemas. The reason? This documentary about the fascinating personality of Elizabeth Holmes is one of the most unique films of the year.
What is it about? Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, claiming she had a machine that could test blood from just a few drops, achieving results comparable to a laboratory. This was false and in 2022 he was sentenced to 135 months in prison for defrauding a group of investors. He entered federal prison in Bryan (Texas) on May 30, 2023 and remains there, although his sentence was reduced to 123 months and transferred to a halfway house in August 2027. Her story has already been told in the notable series ‘The Dropout: Rise and Fall of Elizabeth Holmes’.
How the documentary was born. What was a documentary was Holmes’ own idea: documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, one of the film’s directors, said that Holmes had invited the production company A24 to his home before entering prison, and that the studio offered him the project without forcing him to finally deliver a film, unless he saw something interesting to say. ‘You Can See Everything’ begins 34 days before Holmes goes to prison, and Nathan Fielder (the film’s other co-director) and Oppenheim worked on it in secret for over three years.
What makes it special. The film’s first trailer went viral showing a still shot of Holmes asking Fielder why he was going to cheat on her. Later, Fielder would summarize the criminal’s personality by saying that Holmes seemed “very sincere” to him, even though he knew “he was a liar.” It’s a small detail of the film’s very particular tone, stretching the conversations between Fielder and Holmes in editing to make them extremely uncomfortable. Furthermore, there is a twist: apparently the second half of the film takes a direction that the directors have asked critics and the public not to reveal.
Blockbuster. On October 16, the film premiered in 855 American theaters, and grossed $15.6 million in its first weekend, making it the best opening for a documentary since One Direction in 2013. But there was no fanfare behind it: Fielder had gained some influence for her groundbreaking HBO series but she didn’t give interviews before ‘The Rehearsal’. What’s unique about the premiere case is that the film didn’t slow down in consecutive weeks: 18.7 million in its second weekend, already in 2,655 theaters, and on Halloween, in 3,242 theaters, it was again number one with 11.4 million.
And now, the Oscars. No documentary has ever been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, but A24 is already requesting it. Be careful with this carom: the five best documentary places are nominated by genre professionals, who traditionally don’t like to reward a director like Fielder, who participates in the plot and the film may even be excluded from the documentary category. Such a snub might unite the rest of academia, and might be enough to hide it among an enthusiastic minority of nominees. When we get to Spain, we’ll know if we’ll see Fielder walk the red carpet.
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