PREMISE
Thirty-four days before she reports to prison, notorious Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait becomes a mind-bending three-year journey.
On a website called Spoiler Free Reviews, you sometimes run across a movie you badly want to review but can’t say much about, because damn near everything is a spoiler.
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is a unique film. It has a hype train behind it that very few movies of the past couple of years have had, and whatever it earns at the box office will come mostly from good reviews and word of mouth. That is rare. Rarer still, this is a three-hour documentary, of all things, hitting these milestones with very little help from the Hollywood promotion machine. The hype exists for a good reason.
Try to follow me here. Once upon a time, the rap group OutKast released an album called SPEAKERBOXXX/THE LOVE BELOW. It is widely considered one of the greatest rap “albums” of all time. However, it was not a traditional rap album; it was two incredible solo albums, one from each member of the group, blended into one package. Comparing that “album” to other rap albums feels unfair. I couldn’t help thinking of it when I tried to compare this documentary to others I’ve seen, because that comparison doesn’t feel right either. To me, YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING doesn’t feel like one great documentary. It feels like two great documentaries blended into one.
The first part is an unintentionally funny, fascinating, and, in all honesty, kind of creepy look at the film’s subject, Elizabeth Holmes, in the days leading up to her imprisonment. Watching the robotic persona she projected to the public become this human is almost refreshing. Her husband is around a lot, too, and without saying too much, I’ll just say he may be the best antagonist I’ve seen on film in 2026.
Once Elizabeth Holmes goes to prison (NOT A SPOILER AT ALL, by the way), the movie transforms in such a creative and unexpected way that the moment I realized what was happening, I understood the hype. As good as the first part is, the second part is true brilliance, and it’s almost impossible to discuss in any detail. That makes it hard to write my usual review, where I section off the good, the bad, and the ugly. The second half holds a lot of excellent material that may prove innovative for the documentary genre.
The movie runs three hours, and that is my chief complaint. Much of the first section drags. A segment involving Elizabeth Holmes’s parents gets cut off abruptly by her husband just as it becomes interesting, and it could have taken the documentary in another direction. Some shots last far too long, and like most movies over two and a half hours, it has pacing issues here and there.
But trust me, these are small complaints compared to the overall package. This is the best “documentary feature film” I’ve seen in years. See it as soon as you can, with a large audience, and go in as blind as possible. That’s the best way to experience it.
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is in theaters now.