So Nathan Fielder made a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and apparently it’s perfect. Like, literally perfect – 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, critics calling it “the film of the year,” the whole nine yards. Which is kind of wild when you think about it, because we’re talking about a woman who’s currently sitting in a Texas prison for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars with blood-testing technology that never actually worked.

But here’s the thing – of course it’s good. Of course Nathan Fielder, the guy who built an entire career on making us deeply uncomfortable while also making us laugh, would be the one to crack the Elizabeth Holmes story in a way that feels new.

The Setup Is Absolutely Insane

Holmes let Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim (who made that excellent documentary Primetime) into her home for three years. Three years. They filmed in secret, and the main action happens in the days right before she reported to prison in May 2023. She was 42 years old, freshly convicted, staring down an 11-year sentence, and she… just let cameras in?

I mean, think about that for a second. Most people in her situation would be lawyered up to the eyeballs, radio silent, trying to fade into the background until the news cycle moved on. Not Holmes. She invited in one of the most subversive documentary filmmakers working today and basically said, “Sure, film whatever you want.” Corporate secrecy and surveillance collided in a different way when The Bug in the Boardroom: OpenAI's Inside Job revealed an engineer hiding a recording device to capture executive conversations.

The documentary’s called “You Can See Everything,” which – not gonna lie – is a pretty perfect title for a film about someone who spent years performing a very specific version of herself (the black turtlenecks, the affected deep voice, the whole Steve Jobs cosplay thing) and now apparently wants us to see… what, exactly? The “real” Elizabeth Holmes? The human behind the fraud?

Why Fielder Makes Sense Here

If you’ve watched Nathan For You or The Rehearsal, you know Fielder’s whole thing is examining performance and authenticity. He puts people in situations where they have to perform a version of themselves, and then he watches what happens when that performance starts to crack or blur with reality. It’s uncomfortable. It’s brilliant. And honestly, Elizabeth Holmes might be his perfect subject.

Because what was Theranos if not the world’s most expensive, most elaborate performance? Holmes didn’t just lie about technology – she constructed an entire persona, a way of speaking, a costume, a mythology. She performed “visionary tech founder” so convincingly that she got people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz on her board.

So Why Are Critics Losing Their Minds?

The film hits US theaters on October 16 and UK theaters on November 20, and early reviews are calling it a masterpiece. That’s a strong word. We throw it around a lot these days, but when you see unanimous critical praise like this, something interesting is probably happening.

My guess? Fielder probably doesn’t do what we expect. He’s not making another takedown documentary (we’ve had those). He’s not trying to rehabilitate Holmes or make her sympathetic (that would be impossible and also boring). He’s probably doing something weirder – maybe showing us how someone can be both a fraud and a person, both calculated and delusional, both sympathetic and completely unforgivable.

That’s the space Fielder lives in. The uncomfortable gray area where you’re laughing and cringing and feeling bad about both reactions simultaneously. That same discomfort around performance and authenticity showed up recently in Why Anthropic Just Banned Cruelty to Claude, where a company had to draw boundaries around how users treat AI.

“The film of the year” – that’s what critics are calling it, which feels almost absurd given the subject matter, but also somehow exactly right.

The Bigger Picture Here

Look, we’ve been obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes for years now. The rise, the fall, the trial, the sentencing. We had podcasts (The Dropout was everywhere), we had the Hulu series with Amanda Seyfried doing that voice. We thought we were done with this story.

But maybe we weren’t actually asking the right questions. All those other retellings were about the fraud itself – how did she do it, how did she fool so many people, when did it all start falling apart. They were procedural, almost. This sounds different.

By filming her right before prison, in her home, over three years – Fielder’s catching something else. The aftermath. The moment when the performance is over but the person is still there, still performing (because how could she not be?), but performing what, exactly? Remorse? Victimhood? Is she still trying to convince us, or herself, or is she finally just… existing?

I don’t know. That’s probably the point.

What This Actually Means

The thing about getting a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score is that it doesn’t actually tell you whether the film is enjoyable or comfortable or “good” in a traditional sense. It just means critics agreed it accomplished what it set out to do. And with Fielder, what he sets out to do usually involves making you squirm.

So yeah, I’m curious. I’m curious what Holmes wanted us to see, and I’m curious what Fielder actually shows us. I’m curious if we’ll come out of this film feeling like we understand her better or just feeling more confused about what understanding even means when we’re talking about someone who made deception their entire business model.

The film drops in a couple weeks. And something tells me we’re going to be arguing about it – about her, about what we owe fraudsters in terms of empathy, about performance and truth and whether there’s even a difference anymore – for a long time after that.