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It’s a Movie About Elizabeth Holmes. But Her Partner Is the Star.
“You Can See Everything” sheds light on how Billy Evans, the father of Holmes’s children, has been managing her image while she is behind bars.
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This article contains spoilers about the film “You Can See Everything,” now in theaters only.
There’s a moment in the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes where the spotlight shifts dramatically.
It’s about a month before Holmes begins her prison sentence, and the disgraced Theranos CEO is the picture of domestic bliss, lightly beating a bowl of eggs in the kitchen of a rental home. Suddenly her partner, Billy Evans, wrests the bowl from her hands. He begins whisking the eggs more vigorously.
It’s his movie now.
“You Can See Everything,” the new film from directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, began as a project to understand Holmes’s mindset as she maintains her innocence. But it evolves, over the course of nearly three hours, into a stunning portrait of Evans, the 34-year-old father of Holmes’s two children, who has been managing her public image while she is behind bars.
On screen, Evans reveals that he has power of attorney over Holmes and posts under her name on X. He also has created an AI avatar for Holmes. He says he intends to “let people do whatever they want with it,” though it was never released to the public.
Just how much Holmes knows about what Evans is doing in her name becomes a major theme of the movie, which takes cinematically inventive turns to try to decipher whether both partners, filmed in tight close-ups that highlight their piercing blue eyes, are trying to manipulate the filmmakers.
Evans was a 25-year-old MIT graduate when he and Holmes met in the fall of 2017 at an event in San Francisco. In a letter to the U.S. District Judge who sentenced Holmes in November 2022 to more than 11 years in prison, Evans said he didn’t initially recognize the Theranos founder, who was wearing a sun hat and oversize glasses. They became engrossed in conversation, Evans said in the letter, which describes him falling in love during that first meeting. Fielder interrogates their initial meeting and how their relationship unfolded in the film.
Their partnership persisted throughout the legal challenges Holmes faced. In 2018, months after Holmes was indicted on criminal charges, the two went to Burning Man in the Nevada desert. Holmes gave birth to their first child, a son, ahead of her criminal fraud trial. Throughout the monthslong trial, Evans was frequently seen accompanying Holmes to and from the courthouse. Members of Evans’s family, who own a hotel group in San Diego, also wrote letters of support for Holmes. In 2023, the couple had their second child.
“You Can See Everything,” released by A24, was kept a secret until it was announced as a world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month. It immediately drew attention for the pairing of Holmes and Fielder, a comedian known for his absurdist television shows “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.”
In the 34 days of filming before Holmes begins serving time at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas, in May 2023, Evans and Holmes invite Fielder to stay in a guesthouse at their rental in San Diego County.
Their aim, they say, is to provide a transparent look at Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors in her blood-testing company Theranos in 2022. The Wall Street Journal’s investigative reporting in 2015 and 2016 exposed how Theranos’s technology didn’t work, how the blood-testing company tried to cover up its failures and how patients’ lives were affected and their health jeopardized. Theranos denied those reports.
Evans emerges as both a fierce defender of Holmes and a person with great influence over her. As the cameras roll, they are at work on starting a new medical testing company, a pursuit that Evans continues after Holmes is behind bars; she promises to send him drawings and ideas she has from prison. Evans shuts down Fielder’s line of questioning when he asks one of Evans’s collaborators about Theranos. A person familiar with Evans’s new company said Holmes is not involved in the business.
A central tension of the documentary arises over the terms of the couple’s participation and whether there were financial motives. Fielder recounts that in an early meeting with the couple and A24 executives, Evans waited for Holmes to leave the room before negotiating a deal in which he will receive a portion of the movie’s profit. A24 agrees to this, but Fielder is skeptical as to whether Holmes was aware of this ask, based on footage where she claims not to be making any money from the documentary.
At the end of the film, a title card reveals that Evans ultimately rescinded his claim for financial compensation.
“Near the end of filming Billy was trying to exert a level of control over the project that made us uncomfortable, and communication with him sort of broke down because of that,” Fielder said during a Q&A after the movie’s New York Film Festival screening. “The independence of it all was really important.”
Oppenheim told the audience that Holmes reached out to A24 because she was interested in having someone document her life. Once they started shooting, Fielder said he and Oppenheim were compelled by details they couldn’t interpret.
“Moments would happen, some of them that are in the film, and then after Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on what something meant to us or what we thought was happening,” Fielder said, adding that their “curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”
A few days before the film’s New York premiere, a post on Holmes’s X account stated: “as we fight for freedom, my loved ones have helped manage my account.” The statement added: “Starting now, all posts in my own words will be marked -EAH. Posts without that signature are from the team managing this account.”
Write to Esther Zuckerman at esther.zuckerman@wsj.com and Sara Ashley O’Brien at sara.obrien@wsj.com
