Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything, the new documentary from Canadian provocateur Nathan Fielder and his partner-in-crime Lance Oppenheim.Supplied
If you haven’t spent the past few days fiercely arguing about You Can See Everything, you’re in rare company.
The new documentary from Canadian provocateur Nathan Fielder and his partner-in-crime Lance Oppenheim, a genre-busting work exploring the nature of truth and reality vis-a-vis the case of Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, delivered more than 2,000 sold-out screenings across North America this past weekend, marking the biggest box-office haul for a doc in more than two decades. The film has also launched itself into immediate Best Picture contention, with a sterling 99 per cent rating on Metacritic, a 99 per cent “fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes, and an unprecedented 4.8 star rating on the popular movie-ranking app Letterboxd.
Already, audiences are plotting their second viewings to further decipher the film’s many meta-contextual rabbit holes and mirrored hallways. But if you can’t find an open showtime, The Globe and Mail presents a Coles Notes syllabus to the doc: the movies, television shows, music and books that have either directly inspired the film or whose themes seem to have subconsciously seeped into the project. Hopefully, the following cultural artifacts will help you inch that much closer to decoding the movie of the moment – to ensuring that you can, indeed, see everything. (Obviously, massive spoilers ahead. Doubly obvious: You should really watch the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes before diving into anything listed below.)
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout.20th Television / Courtesy of Disney+
The Fielder/Oppenheim canons
Once you’ve got The Dropout under your belt, then it’s best to cover the collected works of Fielder and Oppenheim, who have never worked together before this project but share sensibilities when it comes to the prickly cinematic art of observation.
For Fielder, go chronologically, starting with some select clips from his stint on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, followed by his breakout 2013-2017 Comedy Central reality series Nathan for You, which revolved around sham business ideas, the perfect set-up for an inner look at Theranos.
Then binge the first season of HBO’s The Rehearsal (in which Fielder manufactured facsimiles of real-life situations to ostensibly help people facing various crises), the single-season 2023 Showtime comedy The Curse (about a documentary crew getting too close to a narcissistic husband and wife), and finally The Rehearsal’s mind-melting second season (in which Fielder pulls off the greatest stunt in reality-TV history, and apparently all while working on YCSE at nearly the same time).
For Oppenheim, his run of acclaimed nonfiction cinema – 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, 2024’s Spermworld, and his 2024 HBO docu-series Ren Faire – showcases his flair for magnifying seemingly tiny details, as well as exploring the dynamics of power. Meanwhile, the director’s other big fall movie of the year was last month’s Robert Pattinson-led Primetime, which, like YCSE, tackles a cult of personality with jagged humour and beguiling aesthetics.
Nathan Fielder in HBO's The Rehearsal.Allyson Riggs/HBO
A Married Couple (1969)
Like many of Canada’s most successful contemporary filmmakers (Matt Johnson, Sophy Romvari, Sarah Polley), Fielder’s work is rooted in the language, and reinterpretation, of documentary cinema. And there is no larger influence on that form than Canadian pioneer Allan King, whose 1969 masterpiece A Married Couple – the result of a film crew spending 10 weeks with a husband and wife on the verge of divorce – feels like a direct progenitor of YCSE.
Real Life (1979)
Fielder likely wouldn’t consider himself a practitioner of the mockumentary, which has inexplicably become the default format of modern sitcoms (see The Office, Modern Family, Abbott Elementary). But the genius of Albert Brooks, who birthed the mockumentary genre as we know it with Real Life, a film about a director who embeds himself inside the life of a prototypical American family, feels laced into Fielder’s DNA all the same.
You Can See Everything delivered more than 2,000 sold-out screenings across North America this past weekend, marking the biggest box-office haul for a doc in more than two decades.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Close-Up (1990)
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is renowned for crossing the porous line between fact and fiction. His 1990 masterpiece exploring knotty notions of impersonation and identity, complete with real people “playing” themselves in re-enactments, feels especially fresh in the wake of YCSE – especially Fielder and Oppenheim’s decision to bring Seyfried into the proceedings to act as a surrogate Holmes once the real one begins her prison sentence.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
As in The Rehearsal, the last stretch of YCSE finds Fielder reconstructing large-scale portions of the real world on a soundstage, all the better for him to control an environment that he would otherwise be a helpless player within. Almost two decades ago, the lead character in writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s postmodern head-trip Synecdoche, New York attempted a similar feat, with a theatre director named Caden (Philip Seymore Hoffman) spending vast resources to recreate a condensed version of Manhattan inside a cavernous warehouse. Over the course of decades, Caden’s control over the narrative that he conceived slips away from him, spiraling into something apocalyptic – a consequence that Fielder might want to consider. Or maybe he already has, and we’re all truly doomed.
Related: Charlie Kaufman finds a kid-sized eternal sunshine with Netflix’s clever Orion and the Dark
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
Amanda Seyfried in a scene from The Testament of Ann Lee. The film is also about a woman whose 'truth' was deemed to be a sin by the world at large.The Associated Press
At first, the sudden appearance in YCSE of actor Christopher Abbott, playing a version of Holmes’s husband Billy Evans, is jarring. It of course makes perfectly malevolent sense for Fielder and Oppenheim to enlist Seyfried to step into the shoes of Holmes, but Abbot? He initially feels like an odd choice – not quite big enough of a “name” to jolt audiences, unless studio A24’s marketing department unearthed a Venn diagram showing a huge overlap between fans of Fielder and HBO’s Girls (which is quite possible!).
But for anyone who caught Mona Fastvold’s excellent and underseen 2025 historical musical The Testament of Ann Lee, in which Abbott plays the abusive husband to Seyfried’s title character – another woman whose “truth” was deemed to be a sin by the world at large – the actor’s casting all clicks into place.
Vertigo (1958)
In Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film, an anxious hero gets mixed up in a tale of two seemingly identical blonde women, becoming obsessed with the concept of reality and, eventually, obsession itself. Sound familiar? Fielder and Oppenheim seemingly go so far to draw a connection by urging their composer, Ari Balouzian, to flick at a few classical musical cues from Bernard Herrmann’s engimatic score. And speaking of music …
Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything.Supplied
The Master (2012)
It is impossible to watch the final half-hour of YCSE without experiencing a serious case of aural déjà vu: Just how close is Balouzian getting to fully incorporating Jonny Greenwood’s prickly, halting score from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film? The homage, let’s call it, certainly makes thematic sense, given that both films are about a pair of manipulators circling each other, their own end games getting fuzzier as their relationship deepens. And Holmes – heck, Fielder, too – have become just as cultish figures as The Master’s L. Ron Hubbard stand-in, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (a recurring figure in this syllabus, curiously).
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from The Master.AP/The Associated Press
The Unknown Known (2013)
At one point, the celebrated documentarian Errol Morris was going to make his own film about Holmes, long before Fielder and Oppenheim were involved. That project obviously didn’t pan out, but it’s tempting to think how Morris would have approached a subject who, at least as depicted in YCSE, hinges so much of her life on the precise usage of language, and the devastating consequences of what happens when words are confused or misused. After all, Morris examined a similar case involving the destructive power of words in this damning portrait of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose “unknown knowns” and particular definition of the word “terrorism” helped lead the United States into an era-defining war.
Related: The Pigeon Tunnel, Errol Morris’s latest film, peels the onion that is John le Carré
The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)
New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm’s magnum opus about the ethics of her chosen field – as examined through the relationship between reporter Joe McGinniss and convicted killer Jeffrey R. MacDonald – opens with a line that may as well be burned into Fielder’s brain: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” The great achievement of Malcolm’s book, and the direct line that can be traced from it to YCSE, is that she is just as much an expert in eye-popping provocation as Fielder.
Heat (1995)
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in The Heat. Michael Mann’s crime classic is built around the confrontation between two apex predators, both real and fictional.The Canadian Press
This one might be a stretch, but hear me out: Just as Michael Mann’s crime classic Heat is built around the confrontation between two apex predators, both real and fictional – that is, the long-awaited collision of actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, as well as the dueling cop and robber that they play – so, too, is YCSE a cage match between two opposing forces of monumental commitment. But while both Fielder and Holmes seem to feel the heat around their respective corners, neither can just walk out on each other in 30 seconds flat.