Film Review: You Can See Everything

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | Nov. 7, 2026

Let me be up-front, as any critic who loves cinema should: this column shall have no spoilers. And why would I deceive you? I only want you to experience the great movie puzzle everyone is talking about for yourself.

There are, right now, two cultural camps in America: those who have experienced the multifaceted documentary You Can See Everything, and those who haven’t and may already be sick of hearing about it. But I’m here to remind you it’s truly worth seeing on the big screen if you can, and half the surprise and satisfaction will come at the end, when the wildest of rides stops and you can catch your breath … and finally talk about it with someone else in the audience.

YCSE, as the internet has glossed it, is the unlikeliest of box office heroes and bound to remain the “it” film of the year. The ongoing praise, and whatever awards come next, are deserved.

By now you’ve probably heard it’s an intimate portrait of Elizabeth Holmes, the dazzling and then disgraced Theranos CEO sentenced to prison for defrauding investors with false claims about her medical startup’s capabilities. YCSE picks up weeks before she reports to prison, and then follows everyone in her closest orbit over the next two years.

The rise and fall of Holmes was so dramatic that Theranos became made-for-TV legend, spinning off countless books, films, shows and exposés about the confident blonde in the iconic black turtleneck. So it’s fair to wonder, as filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim did out loud, what more could be said about this person or this scandal? What story, if any, was left to tell?

It turns out, quite a lot. YCSE not only explores truth itself, but how to function with or without it and whether it’s ever possible to experience someone else’s truth, whatever it may be. If that sounds existential and hypnotic, it should. Distributor and producer A24 made sure of it with creepy, dreamlike teasers that pulled the first mass audiences into a 2-hour-54-minute roller-coaster of what is, on paper, a character profile.

But YCSE is so much more: a throwback vérité documentary in the classic sense, a treatise on the balance of power between subjects and creators, a gorgeously shot landscape that recalls the best cinematography of the 1960s and ’70s, an original, all-encompassing use of sound and score, and a mystery that lingers long after the credits roll.

The Usual Suspects, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense all had famously secret twists that depended on dutiful critics and audiences not to reveal them. But the twists in YCSE are more than gotcha moments. They are surreal and simple mindf*cks that are hard to explain, but that you can feel deeply through the eyes of the crew capturing them.

Satirist Nathan Fielder is the soul of this journey, with first-time collaborator and co-director Lance Oppenheim capturing and digesting it behind the camera. Together they’ve made an unfiltered look at a cultural enigma, reinvented two genres at once, and manifested what Oppenheim calls “Docu-Fantasia”: a world that can only exist within itself.

However you characterize You Can See Everything—the title clearly refers to the story’s many layers—it’s a magic that almost didn’t happen. Not only has it already filled theaters with fans, it has introduced an entirely new language to film that is hard to imagine ever happening again.

Rated R and for adult language and nudity, the film is best experienced with friends who have time afterward for a beer and a personal Q&A on what you just saw.