Should We See Everything? Why This Year’s Breakout Documentary Doesn’t Deserve its Accolades

The film relitigates in the court of public opinion what was already decided in the court of law

Spoiler warning ahead.

It’s hard to argue with success. Riding a 96 percent positive Rotten Tomatoes rating from both critics and the public, You Can See Everything has taken America by storm as the first documentary to crown the weekly box office since 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its reception has been nothing short of breathless. Said the New York Times’ chief movie critic: it was a “wily, disturbing, self-aware exploration of the relationship between documentarians and their subjects.” Said, admiringly, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody: “[the film] achieves . . . a rational sublimity, a twist of conceptual beauty, like an equation that proves the existence of love.”

I rarely find myself agreeing with a publication like The National Review, but a broken clock is right twice a day. Hollywood is madly in love with postmodernism, and now, it seems, metamodernism. If you don’t know those terms, you don’t need to. All you need to know is that both elevate artistic license and its fifty fictional shades of gray over fact. You Can See Everything indulges in this questioning instinct in spades. Critics lap up the performance of erudition—and boy, does Nathan Fielder deliver on that front. He spends 34 days living together with a fellow human being and then gestures at his audience with all the finesse of filmcraft: “Is she biasing me?” Do we need avant-garde cinema to understand basic common sense: that familiarity fathers fondness? The narrator falls for Elizabeth Holmes the same way the Nuremberg prison guards fell for Hitler’s second-in-command. This is an examination of dynamic, not subject. Guards not only eventually asked for Hermann Göring’s autograph but also slipped him cyanide, his version of a final middle finger to history’s judgment. This is a potent and marketable bias, which Fielder is wry about—he slips in the last scene, taking up Holmes’ offer to go swimming with her. This wryness nowadays counts as great filmmaking.

My natural instinct is to question, and I admittedly enjoyed both the movie and its aftermath as we all spilled out the theater into our little discussion groups. The absurdity was executed beautifully—but for what purpose? You Can See Everything magnifies little flaws in a largely settled truth. It impresses upon viewers, most of whom are only dimly aware of Holmes’ crimes, a general atmosphere: “things are unknowable.” In another, earlier scene, Fielder watches Amanda Seyfried (who played Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout) watch the real Holmes watch Seyfried’s performance of Holmes in The Dropout. How many degrees of meta-awareness do we need in the pursuit of veritas? Or perhaps, the truth was never the object to begin with. Should we have a follow-on docudrama—sorry, documentary—where Fielder watches us watch Fielder watch Seyfried watch Holmes watch Seyfried play Holmes to “explore the relationship between audience and artist and subject”? 

Tongue-in-cheek commentary aside, You Can See Everything represents everything wrong with society’s obsession with drama and with transparency. The film relitigates in the court of public opinion what was already decided in the court of law. It glorifies interpretation for interpretation’s sake. Wink wink, nod nod; here is insider jargon complimenting jargon. It is criminally dismissive of the truth, for what a filmmaker decides to include in the shot is an admission of guilt, one Fielder does not get away from just because he puts it front and center. What did he train his lens on? Semantics? He shows Holmes unable to understand the skit “Who’s on First Base” when she fired whistleblowers and lied about Theranos’ devices being used in the battlefield; he shows her life in a down-to-earth cottage she conveniently moved into after living in a $75M mansion a few months prior; he magnifies her status as abused victim—which was already well-interrogated vis-a-vis Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s sentencing and admitted as decisive evidence in the court. 

You Can See Everything is of the same breed as The Dropout. I hesitate to flatten the two via comparison, because one is closer to the truth than the other, but each profits off the twin evils of demonization—attributing actions where there were none—and victimization—removing agency where it existed. It can be and is true that Holmes is both a victim and a fraudster; in fact, these are the grounds upon which the jury came to a verdict and upon which her sentencing was meted out. But by and large those walking out of theaters leave with more questions than answers, more speculation than any semblance of grounding. It is in this great so-called democratization, the widening of choice to include all choices, that leads to the exhaustion of our moral capacity to decide. It is the same tactic used by party leaders to force legislators toward one preferred outcome: 400-page bills are to be read through and voted on in one night.

Films like You Can See Everything benefit from a broad disillusion with the powers that be. They tap this malcontent, in a populist fashion, to garner all the accolades there are to gather, collecting trophies from the establishment in an ironically elite affirmation of their values: that there is little known truth and that any effort to reach it is destined to be flawed. They elevate artistic skill—which Fielder does have in abundance, compared to other documentarians and movie-makers writ large—at the cost of everything else beneath the pedestal. In diverting our attention, filmmakers toss aside both the victims of fraud and the settled truth. Do they not deserve this level of attention? I suppose drama about mass shooters sells; the umpteenth, questioning deep dive into the psychology of a man who kills others in service of a manifesto is more interesting than the consequences of his actions. Less so do his victims’ stories permeate the popular imagination. In breathlessly rewarding this pathological retreat from morality, we turn what should be shared principles on their head, in a slow unraveling of our social fabric. It is, indeed, not terribly dissimilar from the legalistic moral vacuity that often takes place in corporate and university boardrooms. We saw it on display last year. This is corrosive, unproductive discourse.

Should we let 34 days of closeness and a deft application of technique cloud a verdict on damages done? I love the arts. I think they represent a great way to question some things that must be questioned, and I dislike the culture-war dog whistles calling for returns to past greatness. But sometimes, I think: how far they have fallen.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.