The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, was often asked during his long career how he knew what he was capturing was really the truth.

His answer was always the same.

People can pretend to be something they’re not, but most people aren’t very good actors, and even those inclined to put on a façade can only keep it up for so long.

Stick around long enough, and they’ll reveal who they really are.

At nearly three hours long, You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s mind-bending Möbius-strip portrait of former Silicon Valley wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes, puts that adage to the test.

Beginning 34 days before Holmes is set to be jailed for defrauding investors in her company, Theranos, the movie gives the impression of spending practically every waking moment with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two young children (showers and breastfeeding notwithstanding).

And yet we often find ourselves, like Fielder, gazing into Holmes’ wide, ice-blue eyes, and wondering: Who the hell is she? Even in a world full of high-tech flimflam artists, Holmes remains a figure of special fascination, not for the complexity of her scam but for the ease with which others, including investors and major media outlets, fell for it, and the apparent guilelessness with which she insists she never did anything wrong.

Although he initially planned to stay behind the camera, Fielder finds himself increasingly drawn into the frame so he can confront his subject face to face.

A trailer featuring one such standoff caused a sensation when it was released on the same night as the movie’s top-secret premiere, and the anticipation has only built since.

Even in a terrible market for theatrical nonfiction, You Can See Everything is selling out opening-weekend screenings at multiplexes where the only three-hour documentaries tend to star Taylor Swift.

It’s a genuine phenomenon, which is only going to make it more interesting when a mainstream audience collides with the epistemological trapdoors of Fielder’s cult TV shows, and with a subject who insists that “there’s a reality about me that isn’t true.” Holmes is, as Evans admits, “most famous for lying.” Theranos, which professed to be developing a revolutionary new technology that would allow multiple lifesaving tests to be run on just a few drops of blood, turned out to be an enormous scam, but not before Holmes was crowned the female Steve Jobs, the CEO of a startup valued at $9 billion despite the fact that the company’s machines never functioned as advertised.

Even in an industry where wild claims abound, it’s hard to imagine how prominent investors like Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch could be so easily hoodwinked, but the various accounts of Holmes’ misdeeds, including John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood and Elizabeth Meriwether’s miniseries The Dropout, conclude that they believed in her because she looked the part.

With her black turtleneck sweaters and artfully mussed hair, Holmes cultivated the image of a genius too preoccupied with changing the world to waste mental energy on something as mundane as looking in the mirror.

(Her bright-red lips and dark eyeshadow told a different story, but perhaps male investors didn’t notice that part.) In The Dropout, Amanda Seyfried played Holmes as a woman so intoxicated by visions of her own success that she eventually succumbed to her own spell.

But as Holmes told the New York Times in May 2023, of people like Seyfried, “They’re not playing me.

They’re playing a character I created.” That quote, published while Fielder and Oppenheim were in the middle of filming, becomes an immediate bone of contention.

Evans immediately suggests that Holmes was misquoted, that she didn’t and never would say something like that.

(The Times stands by its reporter.) But what freaks him out isn’t the possibility that the quote is inaccurate; it’s that Holmes might have told the truth.

In one particularly intense exchange, Fielder presses Holmes on her assertion that she’s “never tried to deceive anyone.” You’ve never told one lie? an incredulous Fielder asks.

Ever? “I’ve always tried to say what I believe,” she responds.

“That’s how I’ve built my whole life.” There’s no question that Holmes knew that Theranos’ devices didn’t work as purported, that even after they were deployed to pharmacies, the company was secretly using other companies’ machines to test their samples.

(In the film, she maintains that she defrauded investors but not patients; in other words, she did only what she was convicted of.) But what she believed is a different story, or at least she would prefer it to be.

Those who’ve read the Times story that so riles Evans will recall it as a sly deconstruction of Holmes’ attempt to reset her public persona before she heads to prison.

Now, we’re told, she’s a “devoted” mom of two, no longer Elizabeth but Liz, and the accompanying photos show her in a soft camel-colored sweater, face scrubbed of all but the most basic makeup.

It’s the same look she sports for You Can See Everything, which must have been intended as part of the same rebranding tour.

Exactly why Holmes and Evans settled on Fielder and Oppenheim....