Has Nathan Fielder Met His Match?

Nathan Fielder has made a career in reengineering reality (Nathan For You, The Rehearsal, The Curse)—be it by messing with oblivious strangers for television; going to extreme lengths to create the cringiest situations imaginable; and constantly making his audience question: Wait, is this a bit? In fact, he plays the character of Nathan Fielder so well, you wonder whether it’s a character at all, or just him. And Elizabeth Holmes, like Fielder, engineered her own false reality: a Steve Jobs-esque rise through the tech world, built on the promise of revolutionary blood-testing innovation and—we’ve since learned—lies. So when it was revealed at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month that, for the past three years, Fielder had been working on a portrait of this analogous mastermind, I wondered if he might have met his match.

You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim, chronicles the month before Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan to serve her 11-year sentence for wire fraud, during which Fielder lived with her, her partner Billy Evans, and their two young children. On Wednesday, the full trailer for the doc was released, and it didn’t answer any questions I had from the previously released teaser (like, who is the shocking celebrity cameo???); but only left me with more. So if this is the first you’re hearing about it, get ready for the scariest, eeriest 2 minutes and 28 seconds of your life.

“Does any part of you worry about me being here 24/7?” Fielder asks Holmes in the trailer. “What if I see something bad?”

Holmes—who still asserts her innocence today—maintains in the trailer that the “now” is the “moment in time to capture this story.” “Before I’m gone,” she says, referring to the 34 days she then had left with her family before her decades-long prison sentence. So, if Fielder is doing his signature shtick, is Holmes also doing hers? Just who is fucking with who?

“It took me a really long time to be okay with letting someone see me cry,” she tells Fielder at another point in the trailer, before a single tear is conjured in her unblinking cornea and falls down her cheek. Fielder looks disturbed. (I am also disturbed.) Would she hypothetically attempt her failed Theranos CEO girl-boss manipulation on Fielder—or a creepier, never-before-seen version of it—to earn his trust? To steer the narrative that Fielder is able to depict?

And, I must ask, is she manipulating her partner? In the trailer, we also meet Evans, who, per Vanity Fair, has a hand in manufacturing her persona.

“Weren’t you worried she was sort of scamming you?” Fielder asks Evans. Evans responds, “100 percent, but what did she have to gain from me?”

“Well, isn’t your family rich?” 

“Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different levels of wealth,” Evans says.

So… what? Is she also scamming him? Is anyone out there in the world who isn’t being tricked by Elizabeth Holmes?

Fielder repeated at TIFF that “to this day, I don’t quite know what I went through,” and the film’s own official description says it “begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.” Popcorn’s ready. 

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