You Can See Everything: a documentary that won’t sit still

One of the year’s most intriguing cinema talking points comes in an unexpected form:

a documentary, or perhaps more accurately, a meta-documentary. You Can See Everything is heading to Bulgarian screens in November, and its premise is enough to get us into a cinema seat. Kinomania lists the film at 174 minutes. It begins 34 days before Elizabeth Holmes is due to enter prison, with the notorious Theranos founder inviting a film crew into her world.

Her story is already synonymous with Silicon Valley’s capacity for spectacular deception.

In the film’s premise, Holmes invites a sceptical crew to follow her every move. What starts as an intimate portrait develops into a three-year journey, with the distinction between reality and fabrication becoming increasingly slippery. The subject is not simply a disgraced founder, but the struggle to control a public image.

By this point, books and television dramas have already given audiences a version of the Theranos scandal. The film returns to the person at its centre, asking what happens when someone keeps trying to shape the story after the public has made up its mind.

The filmmakers are well suited to that uneasy territory.

Nathan Fielder has made an art of absurdity, drawing real people into social experiments and presiding over them with a magnificently straight face. Nathan for You is a good place to begin. Lance Oppenheim’s documentaries turn towards American outsiders and insular communities with a keen eye for images. Together, they bring media satire into contact with an unsettling psychological portrait.

Fielder’s attempt to understand Holmes puts image-making under uncomfortable scrutiny. Kinomania’s listing names Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Abbott and Fielder in the cast, so it’s wiser to arrive curious about the film’s construction than to treat every scene as straightforward observation.

Holmes built an image as a medical-world answer to Steve Jobs.

That image collapsed around the promises made for Theranos’s blood-testing technology. Here, the questions turn towards performance and belief: when does a carefully maintained persona become someone’s own reality? And in an encounter between filmmaker and subject, who is directing whom?

The trailer’s promise is a film about looking closely and still being unsure what you’re seeing. The attraction lies in that instability, and in the possibility that getting nearer to a subject may make the picture less clear.

How long can a person keep a story going, even for themselves?

You Can See Everything screens at Lumière on 28 November at 13:45 as part of Kinomania. The programme lists English dialogue with Bulgarian subtitles.

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