‘You Can See Everything’ is the documentary of the decade

Every now and then, a piece of art will come along that’s so powerful, so well crafted — so perfect — it makes you question everything you thought you knew.

“You Can See Everything” is that. 

What begins as comic Nathan Fielder and documentarian Lance Oppenheim following former billionaire Elizabeth Holmes’ final days before going to federal prison develops into something far more ludicrous and mysterious. 

Holmes’ journey is well-documented. The 42-year-old rose to fame in the 2010s when she and her much older romantic interest at the time, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, created a tool that could take a drop of blood and test for any disease. The tool, however, didn’t actually exist, and Holmes defrauded hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. 

Since then, Holmes has moved on from Balwani and is now shacked up with another Silicon Valley executive,Billy Evans. 

Holmes’ story has been told numerous times in documentaries, profiles and most notably in Hulu series “The Dropout.”After all this coverage, it seemed Holmes wanted someone to tell a different side to her story, to tell her “truth” in her final days of freedom.

In the opening moments of the film, Evans explains how they want to show Holmes in the most authentic way possible to rehabilitate her image and let the audience assess her character based on what they see rather than what they’ve heard. 

Choosing a high-level prankster like Fielder for the project is just the first of many mind-boggling twists and turns the film has to offer. 

Fielder got his start on his Comedy Central show, “Nathan For You,” where he gives small businesses unorthodox, oftentimes laughably bad business ideas he makes them implement. 

Following the show’s success, Fielder worked on miniseries “The Curse” and created docu-comedy series “The Rehearsal.” At its simplest, “The Rehearsal” follows Fielder as he and other participants go through staged “rehearsals” of real life scenarios in excruciating detail. 

“You Can See Everything” sees Fielder engage with many of the same themes his past work revolved around, bringing along some of the ground-breaking storytelling and reenactment techniques from “The Rehearsal.” 

As a screen persona on his shows, Fielder is a cringe-inducing savant with the deadest-of-deadpan comedy and a knack for deriving maximum awkwardness out of every moment.  

Whether this is the real Nathan Fielder or just a character he created is for the audience to decide in his past works. 

In this film, however, Fielder’s “character” is less the straight-faced comic his fans have grown to love and more a nagging journalist with a sense of humor. 

Are either of these personas the real Fielder? Aspects of both personas probably exist within him, but not knowing is part of the magic trick. 

These blurred lines of fiction and truth are awfully similar to Holmes’ real-life actions. In a New York Times profile referenced in the film, Holmes is quoted as saying, “They’re [actresses] not playing me, they’re playing a character I created.” 

Holmes is widely known to be a scammer, so any moment that feels like it borders on sincerity causes the audience to question if they, too, are being duped, or if Holmes is being sincere and her story got lost somewhere along the way.

Ultimately, this entanglement of truth and fiction is what makes “You Can See Everything” such an impossible puzzle. 

Everyone manipulates everyone in this story. Fielder, Holmes, Evans, other figures in the story and even the audience take their turns being manipulated by each other. 

Some of these manipulations are obvious, like when Holmes exploited the millionaires she defrauded or when an audience’s emotions being toyed with intentionally by the film. 

But other manipulations are far more layered. 

The film is layered like an orchestra, with every string and key getting its time to shine, connecting together into a beautiful, mesmerizing concoction. 

Part of what brings those layers together is the film’s expert craft, from cinematography to editing to score. Co-director Oppenheim (“Primetime,” “SPERMWORLD”) uses genre to take these layers and fit them into a carefully balanced 174-minute runtime that explodes in the final act.

Cinematographer David Bolen shoots his subjects in nauseating close-ups, bringing the audience closer to the story than they may want to be. 

Editor Adam Locke-Norton, a regular collaborator with Fielder, lets scenes linger in a way that has a chilling effect. Despite this patience, the nearly three hour film feels like a breeze. 

Composer Ari Balouzian uses melodic keys and atonal percussion to deliver a score that feels somewhere between a Hitchcockian thriller and hell. His final piece is particularly remarkable and is one of the best individual pieces of scored music from this decade. 

Every part of the film is enigmatic, from its style to its subject. There’s a mysterious quality as to what it’s actually about, what it’s portraying and what it’s trying to say that makes it fascinating to watch. 

As the title says, “You Can See Everything.” The pieces are there, but what those pieces create — well, nothing is certain, other than the film’s greatness. 

“You Can See Everything” is in theaters now.