Nathan Fielder's secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary emerges as a Best Picture test case

Thirty-four days before she was due to report to a federal prison camp in Texas, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited a documentary crew into a rented house in San Diego, expecting a brief, sympathetic portrait of a woman about to lose her freedom. Instead, the crew stayed for three years. The resulting film, "You Can See Everything," surfaced this week as the most talked-about title of the fall festival calendar, having premiered in near-total secrecy at the Telluride Film Festival and now positioned by its distributor, A24, as a genuine contender to break a record that has held through every Academy Awards ceremony since the Oscars began.

Directed by comedian Nathan Fielder and documentarian Lance Oppenheim, the 174-minute film follows Holmes, the former Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors, from the final weeks before her 2023 imprisonment through her partner's efforts to control the production and, eventually, Fielder's own decision to step in front of the camera. It was booked into Telluride's 650-seat Werner Herzog Theater as an unannounced "secret screening," with attendees required to lock their phones in Yondr pouches before the lights went down, according to reporting from NBC News.

What happened

The screening on the evening of Sunday, September 6, was the first the public knew of the project's existence. A24 had kept the film off its release calendar entirely, listing only a placeholder slot at Telluride, and unveiled it alongside a teaser trailer the same weekend. The film's official synopsis describes a woman "thirty-four days" from prison who "invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move," a project that "begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon" and becomes "a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss." A24 has scheduled a theatrical release for October 16, weeks ahead of the traditional awards-season rush.

The film also features Holmes and Evans's two young children and, in its most unusual production choice, re-creates off-camera conversations between Fielder and Holmes — including calls placed while she was incarcerated — using an actress to stand in for Holmes. That actress is Amanda Seyfried, who originated the role of Holmes in the Hulu limited series "The Dropout" and appears in "You Can See Everything" watching that earlier dramatization alongside its subject, according to details reported by multiple outlets covering the Telluride premiere.

The numbers

• 174 minutes: the film's runtime, roughly three hours.
• 34 days: the stretch of freedom Holmes had left when filming began, before she surrendered to prison in May 2023.
• Three years: how long Fielder and Oppenheim's crew kept filming after that initial 34-day window.
• 98: the number of Academy Awards ceremonies held since 1929 without a documentary feature ever earning a Best Picture nomination, a streak "You Can See Everything" is now being discussed as capable of ending, per Gold Derby's awards coverage.
• 94: the film's score on aggregator Metacritic based on early reviews, denoting what the site classifies as "universal acclaim."

How we got here

Holmes was convicted in January 2022 of four counts of investor fraud tied to Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded at 19 and built into a company once valued near $9 billion before its diagnostic technology was exposed as unworkable. She began serving an 11-year, three-month sentence in May 2023, and her case has already generated one prestige dramatization, "The Dropout." According to Oppenheim, he learned in 2023 that Holmes and Evans were looking for someone to document their lives before her surrender and brought the idea to Fielder, who had built a career, on shows like "Nathan for You" and "The Rehearsal," out of blurring documentary observation with staged intervention. A24 backed the shoot without a fixed delivery deadline, a rare arrangement that let the filmmakers keep returning to the story as it evolved.

That flexibility became necessary once Evans began pushing for more control over what was filmed, according to details reported by The Wrap, a friction that runs through the finished film and, critics say, becomes part of its subject rather than an obstacle to it. Many of Holmes's former Theranos colleagues declined to take part, according to Wikipedia's sourced production summary, leaving the documentary largely a two-hander between its subject and its director.

Who is affected

The film lands squarely inside this year's Best Picture conversation at a moment when the Academy has spent recent seasons publicly wrestling with why, seventeen years after expanding the category to accommodate a wider range of films, no documentary has ever made the cut. Under the Academy's own published rules for the 99th Academy Awards, a documentary feature can qualify for Best Picture through the standard General Entry process, a pathway that has technically existed for nine decades without ever producing a crossover nomination in the top category. A24, which has never won Best Picture despite films like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" taking the prize under its distribution, is treating the film as a marquee awards title rather than a niche nonfiction release, moving it into theaters in mid-October rather than holding it for a quiet awards-qualifying run.

The film also puts renewed scrutiny on Holmes herself, who remains in prison and has continued to maintain her innocence publicly; she posted "I'm always being real" on social media alongside the film's trailer. Evans, who runs a real-estate startup and has fathered two children with Holmes since her sentencing, emerges in critics' accounts as a central and unflattering presence, complicating a story that had largely receded from headlines since her surrender.

Reaction

Critics who saw the secret screening described leaving disoriented by how the film folds Fielder's own manipulations into its portrait of Holmes's. Fielder has said the experience of being welcomed so readily into the couple's home unsettled him well after filming wrapped.

"That messed with my head," Fielder said of Holmes and Evans's willingness to let him into their lives, adding: "I'm struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced."

Holmes, for her part, pushed back on camera against suggestions that she was performing for the crew, telling Fielder at one point, "Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that" — a line multiple outlets that attended the Telluride screening singled out as emblematic of the film's central tension between sincerity and performance.

What happens next

"You Can See Everything" opens in theaters on October 16, giving voters and audiences roughly six weeks to weigh in before nominations voting begins in earnest. Awards handicappers caution that the same qualities driving the acclaim — Fielder's on-camera presence, the re-created scenes with Seyfried standing in for Holmes, and the blurred line between documentary access and staged confrontation — could just as easily unsettle Documentary Branch voters who have historically favored more conventional nonfiction filmmaking, a tension flagged in coverage from both Gold Derby and The Hollywood Reporter's awards desk. Whether the film becomes the one to finally crack the Best Picture category, or simply the year's most discussed nonfiction release, will not be clear until nominations are announced early next year.