This article contains major You Can See Everything spoilers. Please do not read before watching the movie.Is Nathan Fielder trying to protect Elizabeth Holmes? Are we protecting Elizabeth Holmes?It’s the final, devastatingly open-ended question that Fielder leaves hanging in his and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything. Are the filmmakers compromised by Elizabeth Holmes’ widely recognized abilities to manipulate? Is the audience? After all, as Fielder’s onscreen accomplice, therapist, and final accuser states in the last line of the movie, “You care about her.”By the film’s end, I suspect many viewers do as well. Even Fielder’s partner-in-crime seems to have some personal investment in Holmes’ fate, if only in relation to her seemingly exploitative husband. And yet, the mere fact that the woman who wants to help Fielder save Elizabeth from her ethically-dubious hubby is none other than Amanda Seyfried, an actress who cultivated a career highlight—not to mention an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and slew of other awards—by playing a fictionalized, and deeply unflattering, version of Holmes just adds one more layer of surreal discomfort to You Can See Everything’s finale.In a documentary marketed as a tête-à-tête between master manipulators, one a filmmaker/comedian notorious for his reality-bending onscreen persona, and the other a woman currently serving an 11-year prison sentence after being found guilty of fraud, the end of the movie might seem almost wholesome. For all her demonstrable crimes, Holmes is still a human being, still a mother, and still seemingly at the mercy of a man who uses her name and even her voice on social media platforms like X without her apparent knowledge or consent.At least that is how Fielder and Oppenheim choose to frame the last act of their movie in a script that Fielder literally wrote based on his recollections of a visit with Holmes at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan. And these words Fielder puts in Holmes’ mouth are then given life by none other than Seyfried, a woman whom the real Holmes seems to detest, or is at the very least wary of. There is, indeed, a moment that blows well beyond the famous Lewis Carroll Looking Glass metaphor, shattering that infinity mirror into a million refracted pieces as Seyfried-as-Holmes says she never wants to have that actress speak for her again, and laments once more the unfairness with which she is depicted as criminally manipulative in Hulu’s The Dropout.There is an especially sadistic irony when Fielder and Oppenheim juxtapose Seyfried-as-Holmes dismissing The Dropout scene where Seyfried (still as Holmes) reacts to her alleged miracle machine, the Edison, not being able to analyze blood. “It doesn’t matter,” the TV Holmes tells her engineers. The implication, of course, is that Holmes decided to lie to the world in this moment. The real Holmes (as still played by Seyfried) claims that never happened, and then Fielder’s doc cuts to a moment days earlier when Seyfried sits with Fielder before a roaring fire, and The Dropout star first reads Holmes’ criticism of her work.“It’s a work of fiction,” a visibly defensive Seyfried insists with such persistence that Fielder only responds with his trademark smirk. “It could have happened” like it appears in the TV show, Seyfried explains, but it probably didn’t. As is Fielder’s wont on TV shows like Nathan for You and The Rehearsal—series that blur the line between documentary, reality TV, and straight up scripted comedy—Fielder quietly hands Seyfried what might amount to a bit of rope. And yet, both Fiedler and his (mostly) off-screen co-director, Oppenheim, sympathize with the justifications Seyfried makes for The Dropout. Hell, Oppenheim made those same distinctions to me barely a month ago while discussing the differences between the real public figure Chris Hansen and the “fictional character” Robert Pattinson plays in Oppenheim’s Primetime.But the responsibility of artists to the historical figures they dramatize isn’t the moral of You Can See Everything, if there is anything moral at all playing here. Rather, the film seems to hold a mirror up to our times while asking how far does our notion of “truth” really apply in a post-fact world where a woman like Holmes could see her now defunct medical-tech company, Theranos, reach a valuation of $9 billion due to little more than smoke, mirrors, and deception. It then asks us to still buy in…cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Who, If Anyone, Is on First?Perhaps the greatest trick at work with You Can See Everything is its marketing. For a movie audiences didn’t know existed a scant 45 days ago, public awareness is through the roof online due to a cryptic teaser in which an eerily wide-eyed Holmes unconvincingly pleads with Fielder, “Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.” The obvious lie of this claim from a woman who is desperate to repair her public image is as glaring as the 60-foot-tall photo of her eyes dotting billboards from Times Square to Burbank.And to be fair, much of the first half of the doc is what it’s sold as: a game of cat and mouse between a real-life criminal and a baffling choice for her documentarian. In the seeming first day of the film’s shoot in San Diego, Fielder even asks if he was selected because Holmes and her husband, William “Billy” Evans, thought he would be a pushover because he is neither a scientist nor a tech journalist. Elizabeth and Billy’s protestations are unconvincing, but so much of Elizabeth is. At first. For instance, both she and Evans attempt to explain away her promise that the Edison could test for most or all blood diseases and conditions with little better than a pinprick. What she apparently meant, they claim in the doc, is that the Edison one day could test for any blood disease. Just not today.This highly suspicious claim is mercilessly defanged by Fielder from an entirely leftfield direction when he compares it to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, a comedic sketch, and a pair of comedians, Holmes claims to have never heard of. Unfortunately for her, Fielder rarely lets go of a loose thread, and soon enough is pulling out his laptop and looking up the sketch online. Like everyone else, Holmes smiles along at the wordplay, but afterward claims like her freedom depended on it that she cannot possibly comprehend what the joke is, even while Fielder painstakingly explains it to her like he’s talking to a small child. This is a woman, dropout or not, who attended Stanford; a woman who, fraud or not, acquired the status of billionaire by convincing venture capitalists, politicians, and mostly male opinion-leaders that she was the next Steve Jobs. And here she now is befuddled by the nuances of Abbott and Costello.That is the documentary Fielder and Oppenheim likely thought they were making when they accepted the invitation to keep up with the Holmses: a methodical takedown of Elizabeth’s rationalizations and justifications. But a funny thing continues to develop as You Can See Everything keeps going: the focus stops being about Holmes the criminal. Part of this is by design as Holmes and Evans obviously want to highlight her humanity by inviting filmmakers to document moments that appear genuine between Elizabeth and the children she will soon have to leave behind for almost their entire childhoods. Other tableaus might appear more calculated, still it slowly becomes difficult to parse out which is which.Yet the focus really blurs when Oppenheim and Fielder turn their attention fully from Holmes to Evans. Part of this is a matter of necessity since halfway through the doc, Elizabeth goes to prison. But while that would be the obvious place to end a film like this, Fielder and Oppenheim kept shooting for close to a year, and furthermore revealed more of their documentary’s origins.The Real VillainHolmes might be the marketing hook that draws people in, but the ultimate subject du jour of this film is not the founder of Theranos; it’s her husband Billy. He’s introduced innocuous enough as nearly in the background, the supportive husband who seems protective of Elizabeth and a bit wary of Fielder when he’s doing his Dracula thing and comically staring at them from the shadows of their rented beachside San Diego home.As the film unfurls, however, it is Billy who floats more than once the idea of resurrecting or iterating upon Theranos’ goal to democratize medicine through the wonders of technology. The words “Theranos 2.0” are even uttered before an incredulous Fielder. In a film filled with grifters and deceivers, there is something preternaturally off about this guy who opts to do full-frontal nudity for what he thinks is a puff piece documentary.It’s only after Holmes goes to prison, however, that the doc puts its real cards on the table. In a sequence that deliberately echoes The Rehearsal, Fielder has a combination of actors and real people playing themselves reenact how, they claim, Evans came to them to pitch this documentary. He and Holmes invited Fielder, Oppenheim, and A24 executives over to discuss a potential film, and then Holmes left the room. It is at this moment Billy breaks the ethical taboo of documentary filmmaking and demands a cut of the profits of the film from A24. We’re then told the filmmakers reluctantly agreed, assuming this was a rope-a-dope, pay-to-play move that Billy and Elizabeth collaborated on as spouses. But then during the actual making of the documentary, Fielder becomes hung up on a maddening aside by Holmes: she claims she’ll never make a dime off this documentary.This is what becomes the driving thesis of Fielder’s movie. If Holmes really did not know that her husband established a profit-sharing deal on the side, she is the victim of a leaching, exploitative creep. And if she did, she has successfully manipulated the Nathan for You mastermind.Much of the rest of the documentary thus turns into an attempt to better understand Billy Evans, who increasingly seems strung out, guarded, and from my vantage, delusional. He certainly isn’t going to win over the core A24 demo when he insults Amanda Seyfried to her face and describes himself as an acolyte of Charlie Kirk. But Evans also seems sincerely creepy in the way he talks down to Seyfried, just as he seemed aggressively controlling when he dismissed Holmes on-camera and took over egg-beating duties from her earlier in the movie.Furthermore, by his own admission in the film’s back half, he is using the power of attorney to speak as “Elizabeth Holmes” online through her X social media handle while the real woman and mother of his children sweats in a Texas prison. If there is a villain in this movie, it ain’t Elizabeth.The Final ManipulationWhich brings us back to the infinitely slippery ending. Over the course of the film’s back nine, we are given every reason to holster our healthy skepticism of Elizabeth Holmes and instead replace it with empathy—not for an innocent woman wrongly accused, but for a woman whose celebrity has been commandeered by a man who will literally profit off her name while she rots. He’ll even start Twitter-wars by cursing out strangers and kids online like a proper edge-lord douchebag.After seeing that context in a rough edit of the film, Seyfried exclaims, “I want to break them up!” Her reaction, I should add, got applause and guffaws at the film’s posh New York Film Festival premiere. We want to see Amanda Seyfried, and Nathan freakin’ Fielder, save damsel-in-distress Elizabeth Holmes.All of the uncanny unreality of the film’s third act where Seyfried reprises the role of Elizabeth in Fielder’s little “documented” reenactments is in service of a noble cause; or at least discovering if Holmes is aware that she’s being manipulated by her husband. But any real catharsis in this vein is ultimately impossible to capture on video. Federal prison does not allow you to record visits on your iPhone, never mind a professional-grade 4K film camera.Hence the film’s final revelations are left to Fielder to relay to us after the fact, along with Seyfried’s help. The filmmaker’s contemporaneous journaling of his morning with Elizabeth in a dreary prison certainly has the ring of truth in the way it’s filmed. Every word Fielder claims to remember, every inflection of Holmes’ answers to his questions, he labors over and debates wth Seyfried. Each time, though, Fielder ultimately takes the most positive and charitable spin on Holmes’ responses. When Seyfried offers a more cryptic line-reading, he asks her to do it again with an entirely different motivation.The takeaway would seem to be that Holmes claimed to know that Billy tried to extract a cut of the profits from A24, but only because she didn’t want to seem to be betraying the father of her children. She also unconvincingly (in Fielder and Seyfried’s hands) claims to give her blessing to Billy putting words in her mouth on the internet. She ultimately is just trying to survive hell right now, and is so happy to see her husband and children that the manipulations Fielder, Seyfried, and the audience obsess over are rendered trivial. Furthermore, days after Fielder’s visit, Evans rescinded his claim on You Can See Everything profits, seemingly suggesting that behind closed doors, Holmes put a stop to it.… But that is just the most optimistic reading of the details we have, if also the reading Fielder most favors. Another might be that she really knew about her husband’s high-handed claims on the profit, and only after she was confronted with it on camera did she and Evans realize how bad this would make them look in a film they at one point hoped would be a Prince Harry and Meghan Markle-style puff piece.This is still the woman who lied to the world about inventing a miracle machine, and this is still a filmmaker who enjoys playing fast and loose with ephemeral things like “truth,” especially in a modern era where you can win an Emmy for playing a “fictional” real person, and reality TV stars run the world. You Can See Everything is like the demon in The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. It explains exactly what it’s doing and how it’s going to guide you straight into the mouth of hell. But it’s so honest and forthright about that, and so entertaining and distracting, you’re still a little surprised when we get to that impossible destination.One way to read the end of the film is that whether Holmes knew about Evans’ greed or not, Fielder and Oppenheim have lost their objectivity. He all but admits as much when Seyfried says “you care about her,” and Fielder doesn’t have a response. The way that hangs over the film is evidence of his, and our, complicity in rooting for Holmes.But another, far darker way of reading it is to question whether Fielder and Oppenheim always intended to lull us to this state, hence waiting until late in the narrative to reveal Evans’ demands, and only after Holmes seems possibly innocent of the quid pro quo. There even seems to be an open question about the final shot of the movie: a man who looks an awful lot like Nathan Fielder frolics in the cold, wintry waves of a golden San Diegan coast. If it is him, it contradicts Fielder’s claim earlier in the movie that he doesn’t swim in cold water. It also is a very cozy moment in the Holmes home.No matter how objective and clear-headed you attempt to be, it’s so easy to get swept away in a good narrative, losing touch of the shoreline and the firm ground you were sure rested underneath your feet.You Can See Everything is in theaters now.The post You Can See Everything: Exploring the Ending and Nathan Fielder’s Spoiler-Filled Intentions appeared first on Den of Geek.