'As famous and defiant as ever': Why Elizabeth Holmes remains the US's most fascinating fraudster

Once a symbol of tech's promise, Holmes was brought down by her false claims about a blood-testing device. Now gripping new film You Can See Everything explores her baffling character.

Nathan Fielder did not set out to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. As he explained on stage after the premiere of You Can See Everything at the New York Film Festival two weeks ago, at first he was just curious to meet her. He was far from alone in wondering about a woman who has captivated public attention, for better and then for worse, for more than a decade.

Warning: This article contains mild spoilers for You Can See Everything

In 2014 Holmes was heralded as a self-made billionaire and founder of Theranos, a health technology company that claimed to have an invented a device that could diagnose illnesses with a single pinprick of blood. She had cultivated a striking image, encapsulated in her appearance on the cover of Fortune magazine: a disconcerting wide-eyed stare, bright red lips and a Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck. But she became an even more fascinating figure after her spectacular fall, when it turned out the device wasn't working and sometimes gave false results. Convicted of defrauding investors, she went to federal prison in May 2023.

Holmes's continuing fame has been perfectly in sync with the times: once a glamorous symbol of tech's promise in the heady days of Silicon Valley, she is an avatar of danger and overreach today, when scepticism about big tech is rampant. Beyond that, the fact that her company dealt with people's health added a visceral charge to its failures.

In 2019 a Guardian article succinctly captured a few other reasons behind the public's apparently endless interest in her, calling Holmes's story "a true crime saga with a dash of Fyre Fest-schadenfreude and the added bonus of an icy blonde with a mysteriously deep voice". Her case has already fuelled The Inventor, a trenchant documentary by Alex Gibney, as well as a popular podcast, The Dropout, and a dramatic series of the same name, which earned Amanda Seyfried an Emmy for her vivid portrayal of Holmes.

Now there is You Can See Everything – a wild, ironically titled, often comic hall-of-mirrors, which is one of buzziest films of recent times. Standby lines for the New York premiere went around the block. Festival screenings were followed by critical praise that used words like "masterpiece", and there has been speculation the film could land an Oscar nomination for best picture – the first time ever for a documentary.

Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, followed Holmes, her partner, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the weeks just before she reported to prison. Her decision to give them such access seems part of a strenuous attempt to declare her innocence and reform her image. Shortly before going to prison she gave a long interview to the New York Times, resulting in an article widely criticised for being too willing to buy into her reformed, softened image as a "devoted mother" who volunteers at a rape crisis centre. Around the same time, Oppenheim heard that Holmes had reached out to film companies and had talked to A24, he told the New York audience, and he and Fielder met with the company and then with her.

Even Fielder was surprised she agreed. "I wouldn't think I'd be the person you'd want," he said at the premiere. He is known for a unique brand of acerbic, quasi-real television series: in Nathan For You, he set up a variety of fake businesses while The Rehearsal is centred around the extreme lengths he goes to stage events from ordinary people's lives.

Oppenheim is just as unlikely, a sharp documentarian and recently the director of the feature Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as a predator-chasing television host. But Holmes and Evans gave them fly-on-the wall access right up to the day she left for prison. In one of their many blunt conversations, Fielder asks Holmes why she chose him. She doesn't have much of an answer, but does say she had hardly seen any of his work.

Fielder said that when he first met Holmes, she seemed genuine, and he had to remind himself that she is a convicted fraudster. You Can See Everything is galvanising as it puts viewers in just that position. It lets her tell her own story, with an up-to-date image. The harsh lipstick and polished look are replaced by scenes of her barefoot and rocking her baby while talking to Fielder, who appears on camera throughout.

But the eerily unblinking stare remains as she says she did not ever lie, that her medical device worked, and that she has been unfairly vilified. She tears up when talking about how wrong people are about her. Her account is undercut by reaction shots as Fielder's face expresses baffled scepticism, silent responses that land as extremely funny. The premiere audience was full of laughter. "You've never lied?" he asks incredulously. She says she hasn't.

The most remarkable part of You Can See Everything comes halfway through, with a turn that transforms it from a mind-swirling encounter with Holmes into something meta and much more thoughtful. With Holmes in prison, Fielder brings in an another person. (That much is not spoiler-y, although many details are.) That person, in conversations with Fielder, adds a bracing new perspective.

Throughout, Fielder has played the sceptical interviewer, a performance on its own. But here a new voice raises commonsensical questions the audience might. They wonder if Holmes's insistence that she did nothing wrong could be remotely genuine, or if it's a ruse, and asks Fielder if he might be a bit in thrall to her himself. The film doesn't draw conclusions, but it posits two possibilities. Holmes could be "the most manipulative person who ever lived," Fielder says. Or, someone else suggests, she could just be delusional.

Holmes is as famous and defiant as ever. She is scheduled to be transferred to a halfway house next year – a move major news organisations reported on as if tracking a Hollywood celebrity – and to be released from prison in 2030. Her active X account includes a pinned post that reads, "I am fighting to prove my innocence and come home to my babies and the love of my life". 

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But as much as she seems to want resolution, the questions swirling around her, along with her jaw-dropping answers, are just what keep the public hooked. Part of the enthusiastic response to You Can See Everything comes from the bold, engaging way it toys with the documentary genre, creating a raucously entertaining film with a serious subtext about truth and image-making.

But some of the response speaks to the continued intrigue surrounding Holmes herself. "I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through," Fielder said at the premiere. Oppenheim said that being with Holmes created "cognitive dissonance" every day that they filmed, as even the co-directors and crew had different interpretations of her character. The film offers the unfathomable spectacle of a convicted criminal blithely insisting the crimes never happened. It's a defiance of fact which once more puts Holmes, however inadvertently, in sync with the zeitgeist.

You Can See Everything is released in US cinemas on 16 October and UK cinemas on 20 November.

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