You Can See Everything (2026) · ★★★★★ · Watched October 18, 2026 · Rewatch · Spoilers
Nathan Fielder: “Why are you smiling?”
Amanda Seyfried: “It’s very complicated.”
These are some of the last lines of dialogue spoken as Fielder and Seyfried discuss him visiting Elizabeth Holmes in prison. At this point, we’ve watched her reprise her role as Holmes from the Hulu series The Dropout in scenes she and Fielder have scripted and restaged. They felt they had to do this so we as the audience could get a more complete picture of things Nathan couldn’t capture on camera. Simulating reality in this way is what Nathan did on The Rehearsal and the results, if you vibe with the larger experiment, are endlessly fascinating.
Given that these constructed rehearsals are compelling with mere civilians, it makes perfect sense that applying the concept with celebrities as the players unlocks so much. Throughout the film’s sprawling (and necessary) runtime, it becomes clear that what was uncovered overwhelmed the filmmakers themselves. They opened Pandora’s box and stumbled upon a story about human frailty and the monuments we build to mask it.
It’s impossible to overstate the thrill of cutting to Seyfried watching Holmes watching The Dropout with Nathan at the ready to probe everyone’s feelings about all of it. His own feelings about what he’s doing are also on display. He’s as excited about having these strings to pull as she is about getting to play detective. When Amanda finishes watching Holmes recoil at her performance on the show, she says she started to fantasize about continuing to play the role post-trial with all that we (think we) know now. This reaction alone, coupled with Nathan’s drive to push the experiment forward, says so much that may not have even been the original intent of all involved.
Amanda Seyfried and Nathan Fielder are still just human beings. The things that drive an obsession with true crime content and us wanting to click “next episode” are just as impactful on these image makers. They can’t help but want to play heroes, expose villains, and feel a sense of control over an increasingly absurd existence.
Holmes and Seyfried both feel defensive and respond accordingly when they get a sense of how they’re being interpreted. Holmes is humiliated to see Seyfried play founder as cartoon character and Seyfried, when asked by Fielder what actually happened vs. what’s streamable on Hulu, reflexively says it’s not the job of a fictional TV show to “teach people things.” This is eerily close to a recurring contention by Holmes and her partner Evans that the New York Times misquoted her as saying she created her own IRL “character.”
No-one is all the way wrong or all the way right here. When we put things into the world that we know will touch others, we do so to the extent that we feel like we can justify and maybe wash our hands of our actions. All that matters to us is that we make some kind of meaning we can take with us into the next iteration. We just keep observing, reacting, narrativizing, and doing it all again. The internet being written in ink and everyone having a platform have only accelerated the cycle.
The mistake everyone keeps making, including us as the audience, is thinking that controlling the narrative when we’re being witnessed will be our salvation. It’s why Billy Evans agrees to filming an absolutely electric confrontation around a dinner table in which Seyfried ends up fully exposing him. His misogyny, manipulation, narcissism, and heightened confidence in his ability to fully control his partner all come tumbling out. There is true vengeance in his eyes as he talks about having power of attorney, control of Elizabeth’s Twitter feed, and the ability to call other men like him to destroy whoever he deems to be in his way.
The image and the narrative are all Billy wants. We see tears streaming down Elizabeth’s face as she poses for hundreds of tiny cameras capturing what will form an AI projection of her for both pitch meetings and her children’s bedtime stories. It’s a brazen admission that all of her value is in her provocative post-conviction image: a disgraced female founder who flew too close to the sun and was rightfully punished. She’s probably crying when cameras are trained on her because it’s the most powerful manifestation of her imagined power being taken from her. On a human level, it’s not so hard to imagine why someone in that position would have to cling to a redemptive story—especially when all that’s awaiting them is confinement with their own thoughts.
When Nathan asks Elizabeth, point-blank, whether she has ever lied, she pauses and then essentially says no. She then equates “lies” with things as weighty as her fraud conviction. This could be a savvy way of answering without really answering. It could also be reflective of scripts Elizabeth has running that do unconscious PR work for the story she needs to keep telling about herself. If she’s never lied, then her story about not committing the crimes she’s going to jail for can also remain intact—but mostly in her own mind.
We watch Nathan take in the scripted pitch of how Elizabeth Holmes’ invention “works” after he jokingly calls it “the scam device.” She and Billy Evans—her controlling, self-serving partner who behaves like her handler—get into semantics with Nathan to equate what their machine “can” do vs. what it would be hypothetically “capable of” doing. The defense Nathan comes up against isn’t something he can easily identify as a coordinated manipulation. It just seems like two people who have really bought into their own personal redemption narratives.
As Nathan wrestles with what he’s observing, we are constantly made aware that we’re also simply observing something constructed. This is the very nature of documentary filmmaking, its glaring inadequacies in truth-telling laid bare by this particular assembly of high-profile storytellers and circumstances.
When Nathan shows Elizabeth “Who’s on First?” and The Dropout, there is genuine sadness and confusion in her eyes. This is partly because Nathan is doing these things as sincere attempts to communicate with Elizabeth on her level. She seems like a lost child not understanding the humor in “Who” being a baseball player’s name and she crumbles in palpable shame watching Amanda Seyfried’s comedic portrayal of her on The Dropout. Several sequences like these end with Elizabeth shedding tears and looking terrified. The film is endlessly curious about the full spectrum of human emotion and the very nature of how truths and untruths take shape in our hearts and minds. We’re either seeing Holmes at her most vulnerable or performing what she’s calculated will buy her more sympathy. Everyone we’re watching knows we’re watching. They’re just like us.
Looming over Nathan’s attempts to get to the truth is the 34-day countdown to Elizabeth leaving her children to go to federal prison. For filmmaking purposes, it was the right move to show her breaking down under the weight of her encroaching punishment. Whether she is performing sadness and regret or not, she is unquestionably on her back foot and regressing to a child-like state—something she may have been doing for a long time due to very real traumas and relationships with undeniable power imbalances. The questions we’re left with largely stem from trying to reframe what’s revealed within our own redemptive narratives as moral human beings. There’s no certainty to be found and the film’s most devastating hammer blow is calling out the monuments of ambiguity we’ve contorted into our own truths.
The fact that all of the above is fully articulated when one simply sits and gives their attention to all 174 minutes makes this incredibly special. The film creates and calls back to its own iconography, like when Amanda stares at Nathan on the couch in the same way Elizabeth had just an hour or so before—and about a month before the film’s release, generating so much buzz. That’s real power: to make indelible, emotionally rich moments that can pull from their own potency with such a small time frame.
It feels almost unreal that such a mind-bending film could be packaged as something this wildly entertaining and seductive. We get beautifully lit confrontations, heartbreaking close-ups, uncomfortably hilarious conversational turns, and literal windows into everyone’s souls because eyes are one of the film’s central preoccupations.
The score is riveting and also that of a suspense thriller. There is genuine romance in the sense that people are yearning to be seen and getting to witness who’s across from them—just like Pina, Penelope Cruz’s character from The Invite, says we all want in this life.
As Seyfried and Fielder reflect on what they may be complicit in while sitting around a cozy fireplace, we cut to Fielder and Holmes taking a swim. She invites him in an indescribably intimate way earlier in the film but it takes hours for us to get the payoff of him actually joining her. This visual pairs so effectively with Seyfried questioning whether Nathan cares for Holmes as well as whether that care is genuine or by Holmes’s design.
All we can do is agree with Amanda that “it’s very complicated” as we watch two figures bobbing around in the ocean, occasionally grasping each other’s hands to try to steady themselves against the incessant waves.
Originally posted on Letterboxd · Read the spoiler-free review · More film writing