Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Makes Its New York Debut Ahead of October Release

Three years after a documentary crew began following Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison, the finished film had its New York premiere Tuesday night at Alice Tully Hall, with directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim in attendance. "You Can See Everything," distributed by A24, screened as part of the Spotlight section of the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs at Lincoln Center through October 12.

The film had already generated unusual attention after a surprise, title-withheld screening at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend, where audience members had their phones sealed in pouches before the lights went down. According to the official synopsis distributor A24 has released, the film begins "thirty-four days before she's sent to prison," when Holmes, the founder of the collapsed blood-testing company Theranos, "invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move," a project that "becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss."

The numbers

The production's timeline is part of what has made the film a talking point on the festival circuit. Fielder and Oppenheim began filming 34 days before Holmes's scheduled prison surrender and continued, on and off, for roughly three years. The finished cut runs 174 minutes and carries an R rating for language and nudity. A24 has set a limited theatrical release for October 16, expanding wider on October 23, timed to position the film for year-end awards consideration.

• 34 days of access before Holmes reported to prison in 2023
• Roughly 3 years of filming, by multiple accounts
• 174-minute runtime
• October 16 limited release, expanding October 23

Those numbers sit alongside the ones attached to Holmes's own case, which remains active on the U.S. Attorney's Office docket for the Northern District of California. A federal jury convicted her in January 2022 of defrauding Theranos investors, and U.S. District Judge Edward Davila sentenced her that November to 11 years and three months in prison. She is appealing the conviction, and the government's response to that appeal, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, remains part of the public record even as the documentary arrives in theaters.

How a fraud case became a film set

Theranos, once valued at roughly $9 billion, marketed a machine it claimed could run comprehensive blood tests from a few drops taken by finger prick. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal beginning in 2015 showed the device did not work as advertised and that the company was quietly relying on conventional lab equipment, leading to a 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission fraud settlement, the 2022 criminal conviction, and, eventually, the void of more than 30,000 blood-test results that had been run through Walgreens locations.

The collapse has already been retold twice for mainstream audiences, in the 2019 HBO documentary "The Inventor" and Hulu's 2022 limited series "The Dropout," which starred Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. What distinguishes "You Can See Everything" is access: rather than reconstructing the fraud from the outside, Fielder and Oppenheim were inside Holmes's household as she prepared to lose her freedom, continuing to film for years afterward. In the documentary, Holmes maintains that she never lied to investors and that Theranos's technology functioned as described — an account at odds with the jury's findings and the government's own filings.

Who the film unsettles

The documentary's unusual intimacy has revived a familiar tension around true-crime filmmaking: whether sustained, sympathetic-feeling access to a convicted fraudster risks softening the record for the people the fraud actually harmed, including Theranos investors who lost money and patients who received inaccurate blood-test results they relied on for medical decisions. The film also features Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, who appears alongside her for much of its three-hour length, extending the documentary's reach beyond Holmes herself to the family she has built since her conviction.

For Fielder, the film marks a shift from the structured, half-fictionalized scenarios of "Nathan For You" and HBO's "The Rehearsal" into unscripted nonfiction filmmaking with a real, ongoing legal case at its center. For Oppenheim, known for documentaries including "Some Kind of Heaven," it continues a run of films built around subjects who perform versions of themselves for the camera.

Former Theranos employees, many of whom testified at Holmes's trial about pressure to overstate the company's capabilities, are not the focus of the documentary, which centers almost entirely on Holmes's household in the run-up to prison. That narrowed frame is itself likely to be debated as the film reaches a wider audience: a story about fraud told primarily through the eyes, and in the voice, of the person a jury found committed it.

What critics are saying

Reaction out of Telluride and, now, New York has been pointedly strong. Writing for Awards Radar, critic Joey Magidson called it "one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries ever made" and awarded it a full four stars, while other critics present at the Telluride screening described it in similarly outsized terms, circulating words like "fever dream" and "unlike any documentary" in the days after. Fielder himself, addressing the audience after the Telluride screening, seemed to still be working through what he had made.

"I'm struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced," Fielder told the audience.

The approach has drawn comparisons to Fielder's past work, which has often blurred the line between documentary observation and staged performance, a tension several reviewers said the film deliberately refuses to resolve.

What happens next

"You Can See Everything" continues its festival run through the rest of NYFF before A24 opens it in limited release on October 16 and expands it a week later, a platform-release strategy the studio has used before to build word of mouth ahead of wider bookings. Given the response so far, the film is likely to be part of the coming awards-season documentary conversation, alongside continued scrutiny of its access and its portrait of a woman the legal system has already judged. Holmes's own case, meanwhile, continues on a separate track in the Ninth Circuit, where her appeal remains pending regardless of how her story plays in theaters.