You Can See Everything: ‘gobsmacking’ documentary about Elizabeth Holmes

“Hold the bets, shelve the predictions and cancel the Oscars party for ‘The Odyssey’,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. The awards race has changed, “possibly for ever”, thanks to this “astounding” documentary about the disgraced tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes (pictured above).

In 2015, Holmes became the face of Theranos, a health technology company, and claimed to have invented a machine that could accurately test for a range of diseases using just a few drops of blood. Holmes appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine and, aged 30, she was named the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, with a $4.5 billion fortune. Her success, however, turned out to have been built on a pack of lies – and in 2022 she was sentenced to 11 years for fraud.

Her story was told in the TV miniseries “The Dropout”, starring Amanda Seyfried. Now we have this “unalloyed masterpiece” from co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. At the Oscars, documentaries tend to be siloed in their own category; this one, though, is so gripping, so extraordinary, it’s surely a shoo-in for numerous awards, and could even become the first documentary to be nominated for best picture.

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The film opens in April 2023, when Fielder – the “absurdist comedian” whose series “The Rehearsal” “cemented his status as docu-reality’s premier auteur” – has been invited to move into the beach house that Holmes shares with her “shifty husband-cum-business- partner” Billy Evans and their two children, said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. It is a month before she is due to present herself to a federal prison.

Fielder is there to gauge whether or not she is the manipulative monster of public imagination; she’s there to protest her innocence and perhaps lay the groundwork for Theranos 2. A lot of hype has surrounded this film – and it is deserved: what unfolds is “more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed”. My mouth “was agape for, conservatively, one half of the film’s unusually deserved three-hour run time”.

The first half of the film, in which Fielder follows the couple around the house, asking them awkward questions, is fairly conventional, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. It’s in the second half that the movie “kicks into gear”. Holmes is now in prison, and the directors find other ways of telling her story, adding another “giddy layer of artificiality”, and raising questions about who the real fakers are.

By the end, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, you’re not sure what you have seen. All you know is that it was “totally gobsmacking” and brilliant.