I don't know.

It's weird that this movie has been so successful. Nathan Fielder has certainly been quietly building momentum for himself, but I still wouldn't call him a household name.^[1] It was a hell of a teaser trailer though.

From what I've seen, everyone's got a take on this movie. What it's all about. I don't know that I have a take, except that I take it at face value.

Elizabeth Holmes, the woman famous for running an incredible scam business, wants to make a documentary about her last thirty days before going to prison. She invites Nathan Fielder, the man famous for making a TV show about scamming businesses, to helm the production (with another director, Lance Oppenheim). Nathan and Lance think that this is weird, and that it must be a setup. The thirty days are filmed, and then some time passes after she goes to prison, and then they film some more. The filmmakers grapple with what is real and what is fake, and we watch the results.

Is it about trying to find out whether she's really guilty? Not really.

Is it about humanizing a terrible person who commited awful crimes? Enh, I guess kind of? It's hard not to find moments of empathy for her, here and there, if you're a human being at all, I think.^[2]

Is it about the inherently constructed nature of the documentary format and how editing can reinforce or counter a narrative? Certainly if you come in looking for that.

Is it about how Billy Evans is kind of a piece of shit? Most definitely, but that's not really a take.

What is it about? I don't know that I know.

It actually feels less like a Nathan Fielder Thing than you'd think. Though the back half definitely weaves in some The Rehearsal influences. What he brings to the movie is baggage.^[3] At least for an audience member like me, you are immediately on your guard on both sides. Holmes is super duper guilty and so of course you are interpreting every word and glance through that lens. But at the same time, Fielder is a longstanding... whatever he is? Social magician? Illusionist? Go back to that teaser. It's not just the wide eyes and frozen smile of Holmes. It's the smirk on Fielder's face that feels like a player wondering if they are getting played.^[4]

The other thing that Fielder brings to the table is, I don't want to call it his "bit" so much as some of the attributes needed to execute his "bit". While it's occasionally humourous in similar ways to his other shows, it's not really "cringey". But to make "cringe comedy" you need to be willing to ask the awkward question that is kind of maybe in the back of everyone's mind but everyone is usually civilized enough to leave politely unvoiced. To be willing to let the silence linger awkwardly, while the person who insists they are being honest holds a long, unblinking stare and frozen smile well past the point that any honest human being would ever maintain for fear of looking like a fraud trying to hold an unblinking stare and frozen smile to keep up appearances of honesty.

But, to be honest, if I have anything I want to leave reader(s) with is that I think what's really worth focusing on here is the other element of the film, easily evident in the teaser, that remains maybe a bit overshadowed, and that is the amazing craft of filmmaking behind it. The lighting, the framing, the sound design, the music. To the point where it is made so well that it kind of undermines itself as a "documentary" in the same way that Fielder's mere presence does. In theory, here is some scene that was captured off-the-cuff, radical transparency, right place right time or whatever. But like, the blocking alone involved for how good some of this stuff ends up looking. Is it just like some good initial setup and serendipity and a bit of massaging in the editing room? I don't know, man.

The result is something that just watches like a traditional fictional film. It "feels" like a movie. It's worth seeing on the "big screen", because you will be just so absorbed in every little pore and greying hair in every single claustrophobic close-up. I low-key think Lance Oppenheim and his crew are far more crucial to the experience than Fielder himself is.

I kept thinking about the scenes around Holmes' driving to the prison to surrender. There's a somewhat tense scene between Holmes and Fielder, and she gets in her car to drive away. We cut to some montage shots of her in the car, looking out of the window wistfully, as the car drives on the road. There is clearly a camera mounted somewhere on the exterior of the car to capture this. I'm pretty sure there was nothing on the car as she drove away in the scene with Fielder. Did they mount the cameras later? Did they shoot for "coverage" before then? Probably that's what it was. But that's the sort of thing they would have talked about with Holmes. We're gonna mount a camera on your car while you drive around, you know. For the documentary.

There's a line that many people say in this movie, over and over again, in some variation or another: "I don't know." I couldn't stop hearing it, I started to chuckle occasionally when it would happen again.^[5] For a bit there, I felt like a smart film critic type identifying themes and motifs, but also: People everywhere in real life say "I don't know" all the time. They are filler words. I probably say "I dunno" twenty times a day and in many cases I do, in fact, know.

So I'm probably just looking for ponies in clouds, finding patterns in stucco. That said, there are definitely a couple of pivotal moments that revolve around what someone means when they say "I don't know".^[6] So am I on to something? I dunno man, I just don't know.

Four Stars.

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You Can See Everything is the:

• 2nd greatest Movie of all time.
• 4th greatest Thing of all time.

1. For what it's worth, I've never been a huge fan personally, though that's more from not paying any attention than dislike. I've seen a bit of the first season of Nathan For You. I've just started watching The Rehearsal which I enjoy a bit more because it is more of a high concept thing than an outright prank show. I will probably watch The Curse at some point. ↩

2. Even if someone is guilty, I think you can recognize why they might be upset when their lawyer explains to them what an "invasive strip search" is and why they will have to submit to one. I've heard it on good authority that we need to abolish prisons, after all. ↩

3. I'd be curious to have seen this with someone who literally had no idea who either Nathan Fielder or Elizabeth Holmes was. I think it'd still be a good watch. ↩

4. When I saw the teaser for the first time, I recognized Fielder, but while I knew of the existance of an Elizabeth Holmes and a Theranos, I certainly couldn't have picked her out of a lineup and so did not recognize who this movie was about. ↩

5. I also laughed quite out loud one time where nobody else in the theatre did. I'm just gonna spoil the (what I assume was a deliberate) joke: We are in the sort of back half of the movie where Holmes is in jail and we are following Billy's attempts at starting up "Theranos 2.0". Billy has gone tech-bro redpilled, carrying some coke-bloat and sniffing like a fiend. An exterior shot through a high-rise office window shows him doing the tech-bro exec thing, pacing back and forth in an austere office, gesticulating wildly while talking on his cell phone, presumably wheeling and dealing with big shot investors for his big serious business. There is a snap cut to the same shot, only zoomed out a bit, where we see the large WeWork logo on the build. I don't know how deliberate that was, but I laughed. ↩

6. Third base. ↩