You Can See Everything is a masterpiece that uses thriller conventions to dramatize the slipperiness of truth and persuasion
Source: Eileen Jones. "The Strange Power of You Can See Everything." October 22, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that this documentary is a masterpiece because it uses suspense-movie tricks to keep you unsure about Elizabeth Holmes and what you're seeing, even though you know she committed fraud. The film is really about how persuasion works and how much we all bend the truth, and it pulls you in even when you can see how it's manipulating you.
Conclusion
You Can See Everything is a masterpiece: by deliberately using Hitchcockian thriller devices, it goes beyond the question of whether Elizabeth Holmes is a liar to explore the power of persuasion and the instability of truth, implicating the viewer in the process, and it deserves to be seen immediately.
Premises
- The film makes viewers toggle for hours between two readings of Holmes (cynical manipulator versus possibly sincere, neurodivergent, or controlled by the men around her) even though her fraud is not seriously in doubt.
- Holmes's invitation to Fielder, his presence in her home, and her earlier approach to Errol Morris suggest the project is a contest between her unblinking, 'transparent' gaze and a filmmaker known for staring people down, so that failure to break her could stand as 'reasonable doubt' in the public mind.
- The film openly deploys scripted-film devices (gothic melodrama, suspense and paranoid-thriller conventions, a Vertigo-like score, the ticking clock), and viewers recognize these devices yet are still swept up, a degree of self-aware manipulation matched only by Hitchcock.
- Holmes's viral unblinking stare challenges the idea that the film close-up reveals what the naked eye cannot, and the film makes that stare a central site of interrogation.
- The film's later subjects (Billy Evans and one unnamed figure) are performers with their own agendas, who shift the ground of the interrogation and produce strong audience reactions.
- The film's scope extends beyond whether Holmes is a grifter to the nature of persuasion and to the viewer's own complicity in everyday deception, producing an uncomfortable but hypnotic 'spiral into undecidability.'
Assumptions
- Audience obsession and emotional intensity are good indicators of artistic achievement.
- A film that deliberately induces undecidability about truth is making a meaningful point rather than merely being manipulative.
- The directors intentionally pursue the thematic agenda the reviewer reads into the film (persuasion, complicity), rather than it being the reviewer's projection.
- Holmes's motives for choosing Fielder are inferable from the circumstances (his reputation and her approach to Morris).
- Hitchcock is the benchmark for combining visible artifice with effective emotional manipulation, and matching him is a mark of mastery.
- Holmes's fraud is established by the facts, so the film's ambiguity concerns her psychology and persuasive power rather than her guilt.