A Documentary Built on Proximity
A new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes arrived this week with a specific kind of pressure: what could it possibly add? The Theranos story has been picked apart in John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, dramatized in Hulu’s The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried, and dissected across years of courtroom coverage. Filmmakers Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, and their colleagues apparently decided the answer wasn’t more information – it was more closeness.
You Can See Everything documents Holmes and her partner Billy Evans at home with their two young children, filmed beginning roughly a month before she started serving her prison sentence in May 2023. The result is deliberately claustrophobic. Extended close-ups, domestic scenes, and a camera that doesn’t look away. Holmes, convicted in 2022 and sentenced to just over 11 years for defrauding investors, invited the crew in – an obvious attempt to reframe how she’s remembered.
How the Fraud Actually Unfolded
Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 at 19 to run Theranos, the diagnostics company she had founded. Her core claim was that the company had developed a way to run more than 100 diagnostic tests using only a few drops of blood. The pitch was medically significant and financially explosive. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and reached a $9 billion valuation in 2014. Forbes declared her the youngest self-made female billionaire, putting her net worth at $4.5 billion by the time she was 30.
The collapse began in 2015, when a Wall Street Journal investigation surfaced concerns from former Theranos employees: the tests didn’t work reliably, the company’s own device hadn’t been properly validated, and blood samples had quietly been run through machines made by other companies. MIT Technology Review listed it among the biggest technology failures of that year. Forbes revised Holmes’s net worth to zero by 2016. A federal government report that same year found the company’s lab was producing results for patients even when staff knew those results could be wrong.
In 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and former company president Ramesh Balwani were charged with what prosecutors called “massive fraud.” Holmes was convicted in 2022 and began her sentence in May 2023. The timeline from Stanford dropout to federal prison ran almost exactly 20 years.
What Fielder’s Presence Changes
Fielder isn’t just behind the camera – he’s a visible subject in the film, and the dynamic between him and Holmes becomes its own thread. Holmes, who built her early reputation on persuading journalists, scientists, and board members, appears to be running the same playbook with a filmmaker watching her run it.
It works, at least partially. Watching the film, you can trace the specific moments where Holmes plants doubt – not through argument, but through affect, through the way she holds eye contact or reacts to a question. It’s visible even when you know you’re watching it happen. That’s the specific discomfort the film generates.
The Journalists Who Said They Were Fooled
Fortune‘s Roger Parloff, who profiled Holmes and Theranos in 2014, wrote plainly in 2015: “I blew it.” STAT‘s Matthew Herper, who interviewed Holmes in 2015, recently wrote: “I’m pretty sure she lied to me.” These aren’t accounts of being outwitted by evidence – they’re descriptions of a person who was simply very good at projecting sincerity. Parloff and Herper are experienced reporters who were covering a company that had, at that point, attracted serious institutional money and board-level credibility.
Even Tyler Shultz – a former Theranos employee who became a whistleblower, who knew the product didn’t work – described the effect in 2022: “I could have a five-minute conversation with her and walk away feeling like my work was changing the world.” That’s a person inside the fraud, with direct knowledge that the technology was failing, still susceptible to the pitch. The manipulation wasn’t incidental to how Theranos survived as long as it did. It was structural.
The film reignites a question that any science journalist carries quietly: at what point does optimism become deception, and is it always possible to tell from outside? Biotech specifically creates conditions where this distinction is difficult. Long development timelines, genuine technical complexity, information asymmetry between founders and reporters – these aren’t excuses, but they’re real. Holmes exploited each one. The Wall Street Journal investigation that cracked the story open relied heavily on current and former employees willing to go on record. Without them, the public timeline of the fraud’s exposure would look very different.
What the documentary adds isn’t exculpatory evidence or new financial details. It adds the experience of watching someone who is demonstrably a convicted fraudster still be, on a moment-to-moment basis, quite hard to read. Holmes knew cameras were rolling. She’s preparing to leave two young children for more than a decade. And she’s still, in small visible ways, working the room – even when the room is a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s looking at.
Parloff said he blew it in 2015, with the benefit of hindsight and a Wall Street Journal investigation to clarify what he’d missed. The more unsettling question the film keeps open is whether anyone in that house – filmmaker, subject, or viewer – actually knows, in the moment, what they’re seeing.
