Late in the much-discussed new quasi-documentary “You Can See Everything,” the film’s ostensible subject describes her romantic relationship with an unusual word. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the discredited medical tech startup Theranos, says that the difficulties she and her partner Billy Evans have been through have only “annealed” their love.

I needed a Merriam-Webster refresher on that one, and the simplest definition is “to strengthen or toughen.” More specifically, annealing refers to a controlled process of heating and cooling metal to increase its ductility, or ability to bend or stretch without breaking. Holmes is using an apt metaphor for her situation—or rather, she might be doing so, provided she and Evans actually love each other, and provided Holmes really said these words at all.

Are you already confused? Just wait until you see the whole film. Fully explaining my use of the terms “quasi-documentary” and “ostensible subject” would require spoilers, but suffice it to say that Nathan Fielder, best known as the star and creator behind the TV programs “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” co-directed “You Can See Everything” with Lance Oppenheim. Both men are interested in tensions between performance and authenticity, truth and fiction.

Oppenheim’s oeuvre includes this year’s “Primetime,” a narrative feature about the host of a reality TV show that manipulates what it presents. Fielder—who, unusually for a director, winds up as the central on-screen presence of “You Can See Everything”—is frequently identified as a comedian, but his specialty is closer to performance art. In both TV shows he has sought to blur the line between his real-life and on-screen personas, between reality and entertainment.

Fielder is also a member of the Hollywood magicians’ club The Magic Castle. Throughout “You Can See Everything,” the audience is made to feel we are in a hall of mirrors. Things may not be as they seem, but just as easily, they may; double bluffs may be at work.

Part of the hype around the project was that Holmes and Evans granted Fielder and Oppenheim unlimited access to their daily lives at an unimaginably tense juncture: the 34-day period in 2023 immediately preceding Holmes’s reporting to federal prison to begin a 135-month sentence for fraud. (Her sentence has since been shortened, and she is currently due for release in 2030.) We see Holmes, Evans and their two young children in surprisingly intimate scenes throughout the home. The couple suggests they initiated this project to show the public who they believe Holmes really is.  

And yet, though the camera goes everywhere, it verifies almost nothing. Between our knowledge of the directors’ thematic interests and the brazen lies Holmes was convicted of telling, not to mention the strange demeanor of nearly everyone on screen, the film leaves us clutching for any piece of the story we might pin down. We only grow more uncertain over the course of its almost-three-hour run time.

You can see everything, but what can you believe?

Faith and fiction

“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” This quote appears framed on a wall in a scene from the film, shot in what appears to be Evans’s office. The attribution shown is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but the website Quote Investigator wasn’t able to confirm that he ever said it. An apocryphal quote about belief is a deft stroke in a film that is, in large part, about trust and deception.

Betrayal of trust is foundational to Holmes’s rise to fame. She dropped out of her chemical engineering studies at Stanford University to launch Theranos in 2003 as a 19-year-old. At the heart of the venture was the Edison, a machine that Holmes proclaimed could run hundreds of medical tests on a patient using a single drop of blood. By 2013 she had secured a deal with Walgreens to place the Edison in their stores; by 2014, Forbes had listed her as one of the richest women in the United States.

But whistle-blowers within the company said that the tests were faulty and data had been manipulated; in 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an exposé revealing that the Edison often returned inaccurate test results and that Theranos was relying on third-party machines to carry out tests. Thus began a large-scale unraveling that led to indictments for Holmes and her then-boyfriend and business partner, Ramesh Balwani, in 2018. Holmes was convicted of four counts of fraud in 2022.

At the outset of the movie, Fielder mostly seems focused on trying to peer inside Holmes’s conscience. “You really feel you did nothing wrong?” he asks her, in a scene teased by the trailer. “I did not,” Holmes avers. Rather than write her off as a sociopath, Fielder treats her as something akin to an oddity under a microscope, frowning and scrutinizing her face in a series of blunt and awkward interactions. Holmes, for her part, keeps her sight locked on Fielder as they converse. She wears a bland, near-constant smile and perpetually raised eyebrows, as though forever awaiting some kind of signal. The camera underscores the  bizarre intensity of these staring contests, zooming in on their faces as they talk and gawk.

Through Fielder’s insistence on watching and puzzling over what makes her tick, we are asked to entertain an implied exculpation for the Theranos fraud: Evans’s claim that Holmes just thinks differently than everyone else, as demonstrated in a scene that hints she is neurodivergent (though the term is never used in the film). It’s as if, by observing Holmes through such a powerful magnifier, the film wants to distract us from the larger picture: namely, that she has not yet done the very minimum we should expect from a moral agent, which is acknowledge the harm she caused when she misinformed patients and defrauded investors. 

By far the most sympathy I felt for Holmes was in seeing her prepare to be separated from her still-breastfeeding infant daughter. Yet shifting sands reveal themselves even in her name for the baby: I heard Holmes say “Ivy,” but the baby’s given name is Invicta, Latin feminine for “unconquered.” This is a cry of unrepentance if ever there was one.

The fact that Holmes and Evans openly discuss a brand-new health tech startup they are working on offers further evidence of incorrigibility. They may be trying to rehabilitate her image with future entrepreneurship in mind, but the idea that they would expect anyone to trust them is hard to fathom. “Fyi you can totally see everything,” she texts Fielder, after an exchange in which she denies ever having knowingly told even a white lie. Yet her text itself is inaccurate. She and Evans ask him, and by extension the audience, to accept statements unsupported by any evidence.

Theranos is not what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote of the Absurd, a theological realm beyond logic and evidence where proof becomes impossible and only faith prevails. But several grandiose statements point to the conclusion that Holmes and Evans see their lives in exactly such terms.

A shared illusion

There are scenes in the film that depict encounters Fielder did not record, and we must take his word as to the truthfulness of these representations. Viewers must trust Fielder’s account here to believe that Holmes did use the word anneal in conversation—and that she also made the startling declaration that Fielder reports as coming next. She and Evans “don’t even need to speak,” so united have they become: “I have conversations with him in my head.” This sounds unmistakably like the language of prayer, and so it is; since meeting Evans, she says, Holmes has come to believe that what we know as God is in fact love.

If Fielder has correctly conveyed her wording, then Holmes is making the classic error of equating “God is love” with “Love is God.” In doing this, she elevates finite, human love to the rightful place of the infinite, an idolatrous move. God is found in the unity of human beings, and therefore God is to be found abundantly in matrimonial and familial love. But to put a single relationship on such a pedestal is to wall it off from the rest of humanity, insulating it from all the other demands that divine love entails, such as humility, or service toward the sick and poor. Such a cosseted love too easily becomes not a manifestation of the living God, as Paul describes in Corinthians, but a shared illusion that rationalizes all, dismisses all, excuses all.

This is not to assert that Holmes and Evans don’t genuinely love each other, but rather that their relationship as depicted in the film seems to function in part as a hiding place, a way of providing mutual reassurance without honestly confronting their situation and the moral liens that exist beside the hundreds of millions of dollars Holmes owes in restitution.

Ari Balouzian’s soundtrack creates a mood of anxiety and menace in the film that is almost unrelenting. We are being, again, manipulated, yet I found it hard to shake the feeling that a sense of threat was called for. Why? No unexpected disaster occurs, only the anticipated event of Holmes’s imprisonment.

Maybe it is a tell-tale heart the music matches—the drumbeat of buried and repressed guilt that drowns out any truthful, healing sound. Elizabeth Holmes hasn’t gotten away with things; she has been dragged low enough that there are reasons to sympathize with her. But from what we can see of “Everything,” her reckoning remains external. As long as it does, she will remain deprived of some measure of freedom, even if her sentence is cut short. 

Marie Glancy O’Shea is a freelance writer and editor who has covered travel, culture and finance for publications in the United States and Europe, including The Columbia Journalism Review, CNN.com, and The Sunday Times.