If you’ve noticed things have been a little quiet around here today, there’s a good reason. I spent three hours of my morning watching Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything,” and I’m still mulling over it.
It’s every bit as wildly unpredictable as you’d expect. Is it a bit messy at 174 minutes? Sure. But it’s never boring. It plays like a sprawling treatise on separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, and the strange gray zone where the two blur together. By the end, I wasn’t entirely sure what I had just witnessed, and I mean that as a compliment. I actually wouldn’t mind seeing it again. This movie is thick. There’s so much to unpack.
For those who need the bare minimum: the film, co-directed by Fielder and “Primetime” filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, centers on disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Thirty-four days before she reports to prison, Holmes invited Fielder and Oppenheim to document her every move. What starts as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon turns into something much stranger, a mind-bending three-year journey shot almost entirely in secret.
That’s all I’m going to say about it, for now. There’s absolutely zero reason to have this film ruined by me, or by anyone else for that matter. Go in knowing as little as possible and you’ll be rewarded with a heady, hard-to-explain trip. And yes, that means steering clear of certain reviews out there that have already let slip a bunch of spoilers.
The acclaim has been universal. A 97 on Metacritic. That says it all. It’s gotten to the point where a lot of people believe this could become the first documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. A24 is campaigning it for the top prize, the Academy has expanded and diversified, and nothing else this season feels quite like it. I think it’s a real possibility.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Tracking is pointing at an incredible $10M opening weekend, and that’s with it only playing 855 screens. That’s almost unheard of for a documentary. For context, the biggest non-concert doc opening ever remains “Fahrenheit 9/11” at nearly $24M back in 2004, with Disneynature’s “Chimpanzee” a distant second at around $10.6M. If the tracking holds, Fielder’s film would be right there in the conversation for the second-biggest doc opening of all time. Presales are backing up the hype, too — at Alamo Drafthouse, it has the highest presales of any release ever, second only to “Avengers: Doomsday.”
If these numbers hold, Fielder won’t just have made the most talked-about film of the fall awards season, he’ll have pulled off a genuine mainstream hit in a genre that almost never gets one.
“You Can See Everything” opens this Friday, October 16, via A24. We’ll see where the numbers land on Sunday. In the meantime, normal posting resumes now. But seriously, go see it, and go in blind. Even if you don’t care for Fielder’s brand of deadpan comedy, or find the movie to be all over the place, it will spark fascinating conversation.