• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”

I just walked out of “You Can See Everything,” the remarkable new film from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes. I think I may have seen both the culmination of everything documentary has been and the birth of something new. Or maybe a stake in the heart of truth. Because, honestly it’s hard to say.

The film is shocking, gripping,  hilarious, and at the same time deeply disturbing. But what makes it extraordinary isn't simply its story about Holmes, the convicted Theranos founder. It's the way the filmmakers play with the very idea of what a documentary is, and what we can believe when we watch one.

For generations, documentary filmmakers have challenged the boundary between recording reality and constructing it. But “You Can See Everything” arrives at a moment when that boundary may be disappearing altogether. With generative AI, images that look like recordings of actual events can be created without a camera, without actors, and without the events ever having happened. Reality be damned. 

And that’s what makes this film so fascinating. It doesn't simply anticipate that future. It begins to inhabit it.

I've spent much of my life making documentaries. D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles, two friends and colleagues, helped pioneer Direct Cinema, a form of filmmaking that sought to observe real people and events as they unfolded, with as little interference as possible. Their work changed documentary forever. Instead of authoritative narrators telling audiences what to think, the camera became a witness, allowing people to reveal themselves.

Of course, it was never that simple.

The Maysles brothers made “Grey Gardens,” in which Big Edie and Little Edie weren't simply being observed. They were performing, sometimes gloriously, for the camera. The filmmakers were part of the experience, even when they weren't visible. The camera didn't just record their lives. Its presence helped shape what happened.

That question followed me into my own work. When I created “iWitness” for CBS, we gave young video journalists cameras to record the world around them, then asked them to step in front of those cameras to talk about their own roles in shaping the stories. The person recording reality was also participating in its construction.

And other filmmakers were pushing the boundaries in very different directions.

Oliver Stone, in scripted films like “JFK” and “Nixon,” blended real footage with invented scenes and dialogue, borrowing documentary's visual authority to sell his often-controversial interpretations of history. Errol Morris took another approach. In “The Thin Blue Line,” he used dramatic reenactments to investigate a murder conviction, demonstrating that staged images could help challenge an official account rather than simply distort it.

Which brings us to Elizabeth Holmes.

In 2016, Morris approached John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed Theranos, about making a documentary about Holmes. Morris wasn't disputing her guilt. He wanted to explore how someone could deceive herself. But Carreyrou, as he recently recounted in The New York Times, declined. He worried that a film built around competing accounts would turn his documented fraud into a question of perspective.

Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, offered Fielder and Oppenheim extraordinary access during the final 34 days before she reported to prison in 2023. The cameras followed their lives, recording conversations, arguments, ordinary domestic moments, and Holmes' repeated insistence that she had never lied -- ever. Except maybe once in high school. 

The promise was almost irresistible. If we could just watch Holmes long enough, closely enough, perhaps we would finally understand her.

But the more we see, the harder it becomes to know what we're looking at.

Is Holmes a calculating manipulator? Someone who has convinced herself of her own innocence? Someone performing for the camera? Or someone for whom the distinction between performance and belief has disappeared?

There's a remarkable scene in which Fielder shows Holmes Abbott and Costello's famous "Who's on First?" routine. She claims not to understand it. Fielder tries to explain how words can mean one thing literally while conveying something entirely different.

Is Holmes genuinely confused? Is she performing confusion? Is she trying to demonstrate that she processes language differently?

The camera records every expression. But it cannot tell us what those expressions mean.

Carreyrou, who spent years investigating Holmes, sees behavior consistent with the deception he documented. Other viewers see vulnerability, ambiguity, or perhaps a woman who has constructed a reality she genuinely believes.

Same footage. Different interpretations.

That doesn't mean the facts about Theranos have become uncertain. Holmes was convicted of fraud. The company's claims were false. Investors were deceived. Those facts don't change because a camera captures a convincing emotional performance.

But documentary has always promised something beyond the facts. It offers the possibility of understanding people by watching them. And here, even extraordinary access doesn't necessarily deliver that understanding.

Then the film does something remarkable.

Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the scripted series “The Dropout,” enters the documentary. Initially, she's there to reenact events the cameras couldn't capture. But Seyfried doesn't remain confined to the fictional scenes. She becomes a participant in the documentary itself, interacting with the filmmakers and the people whose lives they're recording.

Think about what that means.

An actress who played Elizabeth Holmes in a fictional television series enters a documentary about the real Elizabeth Holmes. She performs the role again, but then becomes a character in the nonfiction film as herself. Her presence produces new interactions, new tensions, and new events for the filmmakers to record. The reconstruction has become part of the reality being documented.

This is where “You Can See Everything” crosses a threshold. Pennebaker and the Maysles observed reality, knowing that the camera inevitably influenced what happened. Stone reconstructed history to advance an interpretation. Morris used reconstruction to investigate the historical record.

Fielder and Oppenheim do something very different. They create circumstances in which a fictional representation enters the real world and generates events that become part of the documentary itself.

Are those events real? Yes. Would they have happened without the filmmakers? Probably not. And does that make them any less true? Now comes the moment that makes this unmistakably a film of 2026.

Holmes is taken to a studio where cameras capture her face and body to create a digital replica. The stated purpose is to give her children a representation of their mother while she's in prison.

The irony is extraordinary. A woman convicted of deceiving people about a revolutionary technology is now being transformed into another technological promise: a synthetic version of herself.

And suddenly we're looking at four Elizabeth Holmeses. The real woman, whose actions are part of the historical record. The Holmes performing herself for Fielder's cameras. Seyfried's fictional Holmes, who becomes a character in the documentary. And now a synthetic Holmes, potentially capable of speaking and acting independently of the original.

Which one is real? Which one is true? And what happens when we can no longer tell them apart?

For most of documentary history, even manipulated images began with something physically present before a camera. AI breaks that assumption. We can now create convincing images of people who never existed and events that never happened.

But here's the bigger shift. Fiction no longer has to remain on the screen. Synthetic characters can interact with real people, influence their behavior, and produce actual consequences. Fiction can become a participant in reality.

That's what makes "You Can See Everything" feel simultaneously like the culmination of a century of documentary experimentation and the beginning of something entirely new.

For generations, filmmakers have debated whether the camera changes the reality it records. Now we're entering a world where the reality on screen may have been constructed without a camera at all.

I walked into the theater expecting a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. I walked out wondering whether I'd just seen the future of documentary itself. And whether we'll know what's true when we see it. I’m pretty sure the answer is already no. Uh oh.