“You Can See Everything” is a documentary that presents more questions than answers.

The nearly three-hour film documents the infamous Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the weeks leading up to and following her imprisonment for defrauding investors.

In 2003, Holmes started the technology company Theranos, which promised to make blood testing more accessible and more affordable for patients. Things fell apart in 2015 when the Wall Street Journal published a series of exposes alleging the company was intentionally skewing data and manipulating investors out of billions of dollars.

In November 2022, she was sentenced to 11 years and three months in federal prison for defrauding investors and wire fraud.

The peculiar part is that Holmes has never, and claims in the documentary that she will never, admit that any part of what she did was wrong. Early in the film, director Nathan Fielder asks her where she believes everything went wrong since after all she is set to go to prison in under a month. She responds with a haunting, “I wish I knew.”

Fielder doesn’t try to prove whether she did or did not commit these crimes, as the justice system has already acted.

Instead, he sets up a psychological experience in which audiences are faced with the humanity of someone who could commit such heinous acts of fraud.

All the closely filmed, emotion-packed conversations, many of which show Holmes moved to tears as she talks about being misjudged or not being able to be with her children in prison, may leave audiences with a clinging sense of guilt over their preconceived notions of her.

However, Fielder doesn’t leave audiences here. He further questions viewers, making them ponder if they should feel this guilt or if they are under the same manipulation spell that got Holmes half a billion dollars from investors with technology that never worked.

Of course, there are moments when her words feel like those of a practiced liar. But, there are just as many scenes that paint Holmes as a painfully fragile porcelain doll, cracked by years of abusively controlling men.

The documentary potentially furthers this power over her.

After all, Fielder controls everything: the footage, the editing and ultimately her entire image.

Katherine Repasky can be reached at repaskyk@duq.edu

Joshua Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu