If you were anywhere near a social media feed this past week, you probably came across an unnerving, one-minute teaser trailer featuring an uncanny close-up of Theranos founder — and convicted fraudster — Elizabeth Holmes. Inches away from Holmes’ eerily blank, wide-eyed stare is Nathan Fielder, the boundary-pushing comedian behind the acclaimed TV series Nathan for You, The Rehearsal and The Curse.
The uncomfortable, tension-filled clip isn’t from one of Fielder’s shows, however. It’s a scene from a film that, up until a few days ago, was completely shrouded in secrecy, only to be revealed in a surprise screening at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival. I was lucky enough to be among the 600-or-so people in attendance there, where Fielder appeared in front of a capacity crowd inside the festival’s Werner Herzog Theatre and nonchalantly introduced the film in his signature deadpan demeanor.
The crowd greeted Fielder with a mixture of laughter and applause, but a hush quickly fell as the lights dimmed and the venue’s state-of-the-art screen narrowed into a 4:3 aspect ratio. After a few moments, the A24 logo lit up the dark expanse, followed by the film’s perplexing, impenetrable title: You Can See Everything.
What followed was a roller coaster ride of a movie, opening with Fielder gaining shocking, unprecedented access to Holmes, roughly one month before her incarceration in 2023. Yes, that means this film had secretly been in the making for over three years!
However, in typical Fielder fashion, where the movie starts is far from where it ends up.
Fielder previously explored the breakdown of personal and public performance in The Rehearsal, in which he meticulously unraveled the layers of artifice that seep into our everyday lives. In You Can See Everything, he expands upon those themes while bringing his idiosyncratic persona to the big screen for the first time.
You Can See Everything marks Fielder’s first feature-length film as a director, but he has some help in the form of Lance Oppenheim, the buzzy filmmaker behind the Robert Pattinson vehicle Primetime. Fielder and Oppenheim share co-directing credit on the film, and it proves to be a dream partnership, with Fielder’s reality-blurring sensibilities pairing perfectly with Oppenheim’s richly cinematic visuals. The result is a documentary that looks more like a movie than real life, which belies the fact that everything on screen is actually happening — until it isn’t.
By the end of the nearly three-hour screening in Telluride, the enraptured audience didn’t erupt in applause as much as they snapped awake from a deep trance. You Can See Everything has that kind of power; it’s a mesmerizing and intensely surreal viewing experience that will hold you on the edge of your seat throughout its epic runtime.
I should mention that the film will also make you laugh. A lot. This is a Nathan Fielder project after all, which means you can expect it to be just as hilarious as it is mind-bendingly strange and endlessly thought-provoking.
After the film, Fielder returned in front of the Telluride crowd for a Q&A with Oppenheim, moderated by The Curse co-star Emma Stone. At one point, when asked what it was like making the film, Fielder echoed my own initial reaction, saying, “I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced.”
That’s not a bad thing; on the contrary, You Can See Everything is a powerful work of art precisely because of the fact that it doesn’t provide easy, ready-made answers. Instead, it challenges us to dive even deeper into an ever-expanding sea of half-truths and lies, hoping to find some semblance of reality on our way back to the surface.
Beautifully shot, impeccably edited and utterly captivating, You Can See Everything already feels like a defining film of the 2020s, marking the full arrival of Fielder as a major cinematic force. You won’t see anything else like it this year because, well, there hasn’t been anything quite like it ever before.
'You Can See Everything' releases in theaters Oct. 16.
