“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
And near the end, that bubbly euphoric/revelatory ascending arpeggio was a common motif.
Nathan spent a good deal of time openly trying to decide if he was being deceived or not and while the music drove the tension, by the end of the movie it was clear that he had an open internal conflict about whether to trust her or not, and ultimately left that choice up to the viewer.
The bigger the budget the more custom scoring and less stock music.
The music was composed by Ari Balouzian, same guy who did Primetime which is also A24 and currently in theatre. Both were Lance Oppenheim projects, they seem to like to work together.
But literally watch any A24 movie and compare the soundtracks. A24 takes a much larger hand in things like this than other production companies. They have their own in-house music label. They forgo typical big composers and prefer to hire awesome indie folks like Alex G or Nala Sinephro and let them do their thing, with some light production notes (eerie, etc) and a design goal to make the music part of the narrative. It's a formula and they do it well.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
"Yes! That's the point!"
I don't think this works.
And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.
If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.
In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.
Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?
An interview format is no different. It rewards certain personalities, temperaments, and ways of communicating at the expense of others. Applying the same bias consistently doesn't magically make it objective, it just makes the bias systematic and less obvious.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
Its so weird because at one point they really had me and I remarked to them that what I liked about them eas they were always up for it and openminded.
Turns out they were just telling you what you wanted to hear and reflecting your desires back at you while trying to capitalize on new business ideas and have you contribute food/supplies for their gatherings.
Its super totes ironic because she was learning and reading up about narcissism as a topic, she never saw it in herself tho.
True, that the film does not draw that conclusion explicitly. But it is a film that asks you to draw your own conclusions.
If anything that's the part that convinces me it's more than just a documentary, the fact that people apparently don't want to spoil what happens.
Well, yes. We know the plot, but we don't know in what light the movie casts here, and how they do it.
Then what was the point of bringing Amanda Seyfried into the "documentary" as a major character?
What does Amanda Seyfried actually have to do with the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos?
You Can See Everything doesn't have Amanda Seyfried in it as far as I'm aware.
(/s in case it's necessary)
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
It suddenly feels contrived because of this.
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
You Can see Everything, on the other hand is a masterpiece. The Wunderkind becomes a grownup and makes something serious and meaningful and important. A documentary infused with self-consciousness and introspection. Provocative, innovative and calculatedly brilliant.
Whether that happened entirely accidentally through a confluence of absurdities remains to be seen, I suppose. I am very much looking forward to seeing what Fielder does next.
Both just apologists for obvious scumbags