You can see nothing of You Can See Everything

Critics say Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary is the movie event of the year. Will New Zealand audiences get to see it?

It is "totally gobsmacking,” says Rolling Stone and a “modern masterpiece” according to The Guardian. Nathan Fielder’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary is nothing less than “the movie of the year,” says New York Magazine, an unmissable 174-minute film that “earns every mind-boggling minute”.

If those reviews aren’t enough to persuade you to want to march to a cinema immediately to see You Can See Everything, one critic who has already seen Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim’s film about the convicted and jailed Silicon Valley fraudster says they’ll be thinking about what happens in the movie for “the rest of my life”.

Fielder's movie – his first for studio A24 – has sparked a frenzy since its no-phones debut at the Telluride Film Festival in early September. The hype hasn't calmed. Ahead of a screening at the New York Film Festival last week, the New York Times called it “the hottest ticket" in town and reported one fan hired a professional line-sitter in an attempt to secure a seat.

Will New Zealand film fanatics get that chance? It seems unlikely. You Can See Everything’s official launch date is October 16, but as of right now no local theatrical release plans exist for the movie, a film distributor confirmed to The Spinoff.

Worse, the country's biggest theatre chain won't pick it up. “Event Cinemas NZ is not planning to screen You Can See Everything,” says a spokesperson.

The Spinoff scoured listings for independent theatres and cinema chains nationwide. Silky Otter doesn’t have it, the usually reliable Capitol Cinema and The Hollywood came up empty, as did all others around the country. “There is no screening information for this title,” reports the reliable local film site Flicks.

It's a huge disappointment for Nath Heads, the term used to describe fans of Fielder’s gonzo story-telling methods and the TV shows Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. His new film has a stunt at its core too: Fielder moves in with Holmes, her fiancé Billy Evans and their two children in the month before her incarceration.

Local fans spoken to by The Spinoff expressed outrage. “Disgusting. Despicable,” says one. “This better be some sort of Nathan For You-style marketing stunt,” says another. A third irked fan suggests it may inspire a resurgence in an outdated method of online crime: “A24 literally encouraging piracy.” (The Spinoff does not approve.)

Holmes’ crimes with the blood-testing start-up Theranos are well-documented in the John Carreyrou book Bad Blood, Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley, and The Dropout, the Disney+ TV show starring a deep-voiced, turtleneck-wearing Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.

According to critics, it's the chance to see Holmes go head-to-head with Fielder that makes You Can See Everything what it is. It is a "stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject," says The Guardian.

Reviews like that put local fans in a bind. Fielder's film contains many twists, according to those critics, and they've been told not to spoil them. Some of those critics have told fans not to seek spoilers out: “I implore you to know as little as possible about this film before seeing it”.

If you're holding out for a reversal in the film's local fortunes, avoid the full-length trailer and go back to analysing Holmes' strange behaviour in the excruciatingly intense one-minute teaser. If you look closely, keep your finger on the pause button and go frame-by-frame you can almost see the moment her soul flees her body.

Even that's too much for one gutted Nath Head furious at the thought of not being able to see anything of You Can See Everything in a local cinema: "Why we were allowed access to that canapé if we were never going to get the main?"

You Can See Everything is apparently not coming soon to a theatre near you.