Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Detonates the Oscar Race - and Has A24 Chasing a 90-Year Record

Primary Journalistic Dispatch & Direct Reporting

Thirty-four days before she reported to prison, Holmes invited a skeptical crew inside her home to record her every move. What began as a portrait of a convicted felon became a three-year descent that A24's own logline calls a journey "into the abyss." Hollywood has chased the Theranos saga for years - Alex Gibney's "The Inventor" got there in 2019, Hulu's "The Dropout" won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy and a Jennifer Lawrence vehicle from Adam McKay collapsed before it could even start shooting - but no one has approached Holmes the way these two filmmakers do.

That is the first reason to take this seriously as a contender. Fielder is the most restlessly inventive nonfiction mind in television, coming off a second season of "The Rehearsal" that earned Peabody recognition and an Emmy nomination for writing. "You Can See Everything" is his feature directing debut. Oppenheim, meanwhile, is having the festival run of his life - his first scripted feature, the Robert Pattinson thriller "Primetime," bowed in Venice to a rapturous response - and his nonfiction pedigree ("Some Kind of Heaven," "Ren Faire," "Spermworld") gives the project a formal rigor that Fielder's persona-driven work does not always foreground.

The pairing is the story. Two artists obsessed with how the camera warps the thing it records, turned loose on the most studied liar of the century.

In-Depth Developments & Factual Context

The craft is what builds an awards case, and this one is stacked. Shot by David Bolen - the "Some Kind of Heaven" and "Thelma" cinematographer who also lensed Oppenheim's "Primetime" - the film trades the filmmakers' usual anamorphic gloss for a boxed-in 4:3 frame and long zoom lenses that let two operators drift through a family home like ghosts, but ones the families clearly acknowledge and want as part of their story. Editor Adam Locke-Norton, Fielder's collaborator of two decades, sustains conversations well past the point of comfort, letting non-answers hang in the air. And Ari Balouzian, the composer and one-third of the soul trio Gabriels, threads a noir score through the domestic footage that turns a beach house into a crime scene of the mind.

In a documentary field where craft branches increasingly reward ambition, all three are legitimate below-the-line conversation starters.

Then there is the thing itself, which plays less like a true-crime doc than a controlled experiment in whether a viewer can tell honesty from performance. Fielder does not stay behind the lens for long. Drawn into the frame by his subjects and by his own need to interject, he becomes the film's destabilized center - a filmmaker visibly struggling, in real time, to work out whether he is being played.

Industry Impact & Strategic Analysis

The result is a movie that keeps escalating in strangeness across its three-year span and lands a final movement that had Telluride's most seasoned attendees walking out shell-shocked. "Wild" and "WTF?" were the words circulating on the gondola line, and they were compliments.

Which brings us to the hurdles, because they are significant. The documentary branch has never fully made peace with participatory, comedy-adjacent nonfiction and voters who prize the observational and the earnest may recoil from a film in which the director is this present and this implicated.

There are obviously lingering questions about how much of it is "scripted" - which will spark debates over whether an acting nomination can come from such a movie, because the central performance that surprises in the film is, in fact, eligible for Oscar recognition, Variety has confirmed, although not for SAG.

Forward Outlook & Market Perspective

A24 insiders see hurdles in the documentary branch, which is why they're eyeing this film as a - wait for it - best picture play. And why the hell not?

With A24's arsenal of contenders this year - which could include the summer hit "The Invite," the Cannes breakout "Club Kid" and the Telluride debut smash "The Debut" - is there a real path for the indie studio to challenge the record for the most best picture nominations by a single studio in one year?

That record belongs to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which landed five at the ninth Academy Awards in 1937. A24 still has Chris Rock's "Misty Green" to come out of Toronto, and it just dropped the aforementioned "Primetime" at Venice.

MGM achieved the feat when the Academy was nominating 10 films in the best picture category. "The Great Ziegfeld" was the big winner, taking home three statues. It was joined by four other MGM releases from 1936: "Libeled Lady," "Romeo and Juliet," "San Francisco" and "A Tale of Two Cities."

At the time, MGM was the undisputed heavyweight in Hollywood, home to top talents such as Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer. So expansive was the A-list roster that the studio famously boasted it had "more stars than there are in heaven."

A documentary has never been nominated for best picture across 98 ceremonies. When the Academy expanded the field to as many as 10 nominees in 2009, it pointed to exactly this kind of nonfiction (and animated) filmmaking as newly able to compete. Seventeen years later, it still hasn't happened for documentaries; only three animated films have ever cracked the category.

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