Elizabeth Holmes has finally watched herself get played by Amanda Seyfried — and it broke her. In a gut-punch scene from the new A24 documentary You Can See Everything, the disgraced Theranos founder sits down with director Nathan Fielder to watch Hulu’s The Dropout for the first time, only to end up in tears and begging for the TV to be switched off. It’s the rawest moment yet in a showbiz career Holmes never wanted — and it’s just one reason the film is being called the most talked-about documentary of the year.
The Scene Everyone’s Talking About
Fielder, who co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim, asks Holmes point-blank whether she’s ever seen The Dropout. She admits she hasn’t. So he pulls out a laptop, and he, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans watch it together in bed.
At first, Holmes laughs — an early scene of Seyfried-as-Holmes dancing in front of a Steve Jobs poster gets a genuine chuckle. Then comes the moment that breaks her: Seyfried, as Holmes, screaming “Get me the f***ing money” at Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Holmes stops laughing. She grows visibly distressed, then starts crying and asks Fielder to turn it off. He does. Evans comforts her as the cameras keep rolling.
A24’s Secret Project Is the Buzziest Film of the Year
You Can See Everything was filmed in secret over three years, starting just 34 days before Holmes reported to federal prison in May 2023 to begin an 11-year sentence for fraud. Fielder and Oppenheim moved into her San Diego home to capture her final weeks of freedom.
A Perfect Score and Record-Breaking Buzz
The nearly three-hour film had a surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September before landing at the New York Film Festival. It’s currently sitting at a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and pre-release tracking pegged its opening as the biggest for a non-music documentary since the pandemic.
Billy Evans and the Battle Over Her Image
Holmes’s partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, becomes almost as central to the story as she is. Once Holmes reports to prison, Evans takes over her Twitter account and is granted power of attorney over her decisions — effectively becoming the gatekeeper of her public image.
Critics haven’t been kind to him. Several reviews describe Evans as domineering and “overbearing,” at one point dismissing Holmes in front of her own father by calling her “weird” and insisting she “doesn’t compute things like other people.”’
The Meta Twist Nobody Saw Coming
Here’s where You Can See Everything gets genuinely bonkers: Amanda Seyfried doesn’t just exist inside the footage Holmes is reacting to — she actually appears in the documentary itself. Fielder enlists the actress to help reenact phone calls he had with Holmes from prison, since those calls couldn’t legally be recorded.
So a film about a woman accused of blurring fact and fiction for a decade ends up blurring fact and fiction to tell her story. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus” — about as far from a conventional documentary as cinema gets.
Why People Can’t Stop Talking About It
- A convicted fraudster reacting, on camera, to an Emmy-winning actress playing her
- A real partner wielding real power of attorney while the cameras keep rolling
- Seyfried stepping back into character to recreate prison phone calls the filmmakers couldn’t legally record
- A 100% Rotten Tomatoes score for a documentary critics can’t even agree how to categorise
Love it or hate it, You Can See Everything has done what Theranos never could: deliver on the hype.
