Not even a month after the release of his highly poignant psychological thriller “Primetime,” filmmaker Lance Oppenheim tests the boundaries of reality in “You Can See Everything,” a documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Oppenheim co-directed the film with comic Nathan Fielder, who is most famous for his past works like “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.”
Holmes is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud after it was found she defrauded Theranos investors of roughly half a billion dollars. Holmes claimed her product, the Edison machine, could run hundreds of tests (including scanning for HIV or cancer) accurately with only a single drop of blood.
The almost-three-hour film begins in 2023, 34 days before Holmes is scheduled to begin her prison sentence. Fielder serves as an on-camera interviewer for Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans. As the film progresses, Fielder and crew begin to unravel Holmes’s story, much to her partner’s discouragement.
What made “You Can See Everything” particularly interesting was its unique structure and approach to documentary-style filmmaking and its integration of interrogation-style questioning with reenactments using actors. Because Fielder could not film inside a prison, he opted to reenact unfilmed sequences.
Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in “The Dropout,” a dramatized Hulu miniseries about Holmes, reprised the role in reenacted scenes alongside Christopher Abbott, who played Evans.
Fielder and Oppenheim do a fantastic job of educating the audience about what Holmes is accused of and the reality and probability of her guilt, while also giving Holmes a fair shot to “plead her case,” although she eventually ends up in jail.
Throughout the film, Holmes’s reputation as a pathological liar and manipulator is made abundantly clear, but by the end of the film, the audience is left wondering if she is a victim or is trying to pull one last trick.
Evans, however, is probably the most interesting subject of the film. As Holmes’s partner, his intentions with his relationship with Holmes is almost immediately put into question. In the third act, which jumps to as recent as September 2025, shows Evans’s pseudo-takeover of Theranos.
While “You Can See Everything” is an incredibly jarring experience, its horrors and uncomfortable sequences match Oppenheim’s style for “Primetime.”
“Primetime” follows “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen as the show is moved into the primetime slot on NBC, prompting Hansen and the crew to take drastic and increasingly unethical measures to maintain the popularity of the hit show. It is also Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut.
Similar to “You Can See Everything,” the film deals with a popular subject matter and seemingly defies the parameters of genre. While “Primetime” could be perceived as a biopic, the film also plays with reality and the ethical dilemmas of Hansen’s methods of staging stings.
“To Catch a Predator” was canceled in 2006 because of intense ethical concerns surrounding the show, the following legal battles surrounding the show’s stings, and the death of William Conradt Jr., a Texas assistant district attorney who committed suicide in his home as police served an arrest warrant rooting from evidence provided by Hansen and the team.
Featuring Robert Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo as Hansen and Dan Plum, respectively, the actors’ resumes and previous roles add to the depth and understanding of the film’s place in the cultural zeitgeist. Gisondo, who is known for his roles in “Superman” and “Vacation,” is known to play usually likable characters with a childish charm.
Pattinson’s filmography, however, is more difficult to concretely define. His breakthrough in the 2000s in franchises like “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” shot him to stardom before he took a step back to act in smaller indie movies, such as “Good Time” and “The Lighthouse,” and then returned to mainstream blockbusters as the titular character in “The Batman.” His refusal to be typecast as a hero or villain gives a rich context to Hansen’s anti-hero nature as someone who is doing good things with questionable intentions.
Skyler Gisondo’s character is an actor working to get union representation. His childlike physical features helps him blend into the role of a predator decoy, but by the end of the film, the audience questions if he is a victim or complicit.
Oppenheim also cleverly disorients audience members through his use of actors from older films to portray two predators. Jonathan Lipnicki, a famous child star from movies like “Jerry Maguire” and “Stuart Little,” plays a predator alongside Alex Winter, who played Bill in the “Bill and Ted” trilogy.
It was interesting to watch two films deal with similar subject matters in varying genres yet similar themes and methods. Both Hansen and Holmes have manipulative tendencies, and both of the films ask questions of what makes reality if we can’t see it, with Oppenheim calling “Primetime” a “fever dream.”
“I wanted to take the internet’s version of Chris Hansen. A person can go a little bit to self-mythologize, but at a certain point, people mythologize you,” Oppenheim told Variety.
“That’s how legends are born. I wanted to make something that felt like a fever dream but captured an emotional truth.”
