You Can See Everything - Review
6 November 2026
What makes Nathan Fielder such a fascinating filmmaker is that his intentions and goals are impossibly opaque. Despite being on screen and speaking far more than a normal filmmaker, his audience is consumed by questions like why is he doing any particular thing? Which jokes are he in on? When Fielder centers an entire season of HBO television around becoming a licensed commercial pilot, the audience is haunted by the authenticity of his claim that he’s doing it in the interest of “aviation safety”. What Fielder is doing is patently insane and completely useless in service of aviation safety but at no point in the entire show does he reveal, even slightly, that he’s doing a bit. He never shows any character but his surface-level, stated intentions.
What makes You Can See Everything so exceptional is that it uses that aspect of Nathan Fielder as a tool in examining a similarly confusing and opaque character of a different industry. At one point in their San Diego rental, Fielder is sitting at the dining table talking to Holmes and Evans and he makes a comment that he became famous for a comedy show that was kind of about doing scams. He then makes a little joke about how maybe if Holmes had claimed the fraud was all part of an elaborate joke, she wouldn’t be going to prison. As is standard for this film, both Fielder’s description of Nathan For You and his joke after seem to go over Holmes’ head.
Immediately, this moment raises so many questions (as do all moments in the film). Why did Fielder choose to compare his show to Holmes’ crimes? Why would he follow that up with a joke outright accusing her of fraud, a thing she has been adamantly denying for the entire film? Was he trying to relate to her, and upon seeing that fail, desperately tried to lighten the mood with an ill-conceived joke? Maybe the entire moment was even less intentional. Perhaps, in that moment, Fielder was thinking out loud, about Holmes and himself, realizing, in real-time, that maybe the two of them weren’t so different. I find it hard to imagine that Fielder, a consummate professional, would allow such a slip to happen, and if such a slip did happen, I can’t imagine he would allow it to go in his film.
It doesn’t really matter, though, because what the moment does is reveal the conceit of the film for the viewer. Holmes clearly has no idea what Fielder is trying to say in that moment (or pretends not to), Evans presumably does understand Fielder but won’t allow himself to recognize the similarity of Holmes’ situation to a show in which Fielder got businesses to engage in various forms of fraud, and Fielder both would have known this beforehand and would also never have allowed himself to think aloud on camera like that. From here, we can gather that the only person who gains something from this moment’s inclusion in the film is the viewer. The viewer is given a window into why Fielder would potentially have been so interested in Holmes as a subject.
This revelation pairs well with another moment in San Diego where Fielder tries and fails a couple of times to get Holmes to explain what she meant when she once said in an interview that Theranos had “a machine that can perform any test.” (I might be mixing some words up here but in the spirit of the movie I’m just going to quote off my memory and not worry about the specifics.) Fielder initially brings it up as a seeming gotcha moment where he could say “Look, here’s a quote where you say you had a fully-functional Theranos device, which we factually know is wrong,” but Holmes seems to completely miss what his point is. After two excruciating scenes, Fielder manages to conclude that Holmes seems to think her quote is saying that Theranos had “a device capable of performing any test given that the test is developed at a later date,” despite that not being what she said.
After this snafu, Fielder decides to show Holmes and Evans the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First.” He begins by asking them if they’re familiar with the routine and they both say no. Immediately you have to wonder if they’re lying. Even Fielder, after showing it to them, calls it “the most famous comedy routine of all time,” a meaningless addition beyond trying to express shock at neither of them having heard of it. Regardless, he shows them the bit (only the first half plays in the film). Afterwards, he asks Holmes if she found the routine funny. She agrees, which prompts Fielder to ask what was funny about it. She stumbles around, vaguely talking about how they were confused, at which point Fielder asks if she knew what the name of the guy on first base was. She says no, and Fielder then must explain the joke of “Who’s on First” to her. It’s a baffling moment that brings the authenticity of every word said into question. How could someone possibly not understand the joke of the most famous comedy routine ever performed? Could she possibly be telling the truth? Throughout the bit, Fielder grows more and more bewildered by Holmes, which ties back to the comparison between himself and her. Maybe Fielder actually is as bewildered as he appears on camera, but it’s just as plausible that he’s simply playing it up to cue the viewer into what he’s doing in the scene. Intentional or not, the moment constructs Holmes as the “Nathan Fielder-Type Character” and Fielder as the “Viewer”, to reveal how Holmes appears to approach the world around her in an absurdly strange manner. Fielder watches with shock as Holmes fails to understand basic human speech, just the same way that the audience of Nathan For You watches in shock as Fielder behaves in a myriad of buffoonish ways without ever revealing any level of self-awareness.
The film largely centers around the ambiguity present in what seem to be the most plain statements you could imagine. Did Holmes say that Amanda Seyfried was playing a “character [Holmes] created”? Did Holmes know she was misleading people when she said that Theranos had “a device that can run any test”? When Holmes says that she’s “not financially benefitting” from the film, does she know that Evans negotiated the exact opposite? Fielder, as a character, exists in the film to personify this kind of ambiguity. The familiar uncertainty the audience feels when watching Fielder (trained by years and years of Fielder pulling similar stunts) contextualizes these ambiguities that surround Holmes. Seeing Fielder in the middle of all this reminds the audience that they will never know the full truth and that nothing anyone says can be taken at face value.
The final mesmerizing piece of the film that seems to be consuming the coverage of it is the question of why Fielder and Oppenheim agreed to do the film (and, similarly, why Holmes and Evans asked them to do it). I mean just saying out-loud how this film got made feels ridiculous. Holmes and Evans wanted to shoot a Harry & Meghan-style puff piece about themselves to boost their credibility as they were seeking investors for their successor to Theranos, so they reached out to A24, who then connected them with Lance Oppenheim and, for some unknown reason, Nathan Fielder, who somehow neither Holmes nor Evans knew anything about. The group then met (presumably multiple times) to discuss what the project would be and even after Evans successfully negotiated royalties from the film, both Oppenheim and Fielder remained on the project, determined to just see what would happen.
Of course the film itself interrogates this ridiculousness. Both Fielder and Oppenheim in interviews since still seem genuinely confused why they were asked to do the project. The implausibility of all this makes it feel like there must be larger motivations at play, especially on the side of Oppenheim and Fielder, who had no reason to agree to the project to begin with. Something that I deeply love, though, is that this seemingly ridiculous Occam’s Razor explanation of the events leading up to the film is the most likely option. The entire existence of this film hinges upon two wildly famous, weird, and powerful tech-industry people having genuinely no fucking clue who Nathan Fielder is, and that’s kind of terrifying. If any normal person found out that Nathan Fielder wanted to film them they would run the other way at maximum speed, but out there truly are people who simply do not engage with popular culture in any capacity. The “Who’s on First” moment also adds credibility to this.
I’m not totally sure how I can explain why this exact point, that Holmes and Evans are both completely culturally illiterate, is so fascinating to me but I think I’ll try with a personal anecdote. When I was in college, I took a class on game development in Unity (I was a Game Design major, this was part of my major). Because NYU loooooovvvessss the arts, the NYU Game Center only has two classrooms of its own so it mostly has to borrow classrooms from the IMA program in Tisch (where the Game Center is) and Tandon, the engineering school. This particular class was in a Tandon room and before it was a Tandon engineering class. Only, it wasn’t an engineering class, it was Tandon’s essay writing class that students had to take to fulfill their major requirements. It, in fact, had nothing to do with math or engineering and was just about writing. Analysis. Criticism. You know, arts things.
Anyway, I would typically get to class kind of early, and often my professor would make small talk with the previous class’ professor, usually asking how her class had gone. Almost every time, without fail, she would complain about how impossible the engineering students were and how little interest they had in her class. She would explain that students would regularly not do the work and say, to her face, that they didn’t think her class mattered and didn’t think essay writing was an important skill for them to learn. These little 19-year-old engineering dweebs were saying to a college professor that she was the dumb one for thinking that knowing how to read and write is important.
When I see Holmes and Evans, two adults with more money than I could ever imagine, not knowing what “Who’s on First” is, I’m reminded of these students.
(As I’m finishing this up I’m remembering the scenes where Evans watches undergrad college lectures at 2x speed on his laptop. Just feels like another relevant detail here.)