Nathan Fielder's Theranos documentary releases its first full trailer

Why it matters

Theranos became a defining case in the gap between a startup's technical claims and its demonstrated product. A documentary built around unusually close access to Elizabeth Holmes may add context, but the legal record remains the standard against which those claims can be judged.

Nathan Fielder (@nathanfielder) posted the official trailer for You Can See Everything on September 23rd, previewing his documentary with director Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. The film is built around an unusual stretch of access: Holmes invited a film crew into her life 34 days before she was due to report to prison, and the project continued over three years, according to the film's official synopsis. A24 is set to release it in theaters on October 16th.

https://x.com/nathanfielder/status/2102745016041095550

The trailer arrived after Fielder and Oppenheim premiered the film at Telluride earlier this month. It places the camera inside Holmes's home and follows her in the period before incarceration, revisiting a founder whose company once promised to remake medical testing with a few drops of blood. The premise puts the film's own method under scrutiny: Holmes's defining public story was a struggle over what her technology could actually do, and this documentary asks viewers to assess what prolonged access to its central figure can establish.

That history is unusually well documented. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and promoted a proprietary analyzer that she said could run broad panels of tests from finger-stick blood samples. At trial, prosecutors showed that the devices could perform only a limited number of tests and that Theranos often used conventional machines for testing it presented as its own. A federal jury convicted Holmes in 2022 of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud involving individual investors; it acquitted her on patient-related charges and could not reach verdicts on several other investor counts. She was sentenced to 135 months in prison, or 11 years and three months, by a federal judge. The Justice Department's case summary records both the convictions and acquittals.

The business that made Holmes famous sold a story about technical possibility before it could deliver the promised product. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Theranos and Holmes raised more than $700 million from investors through exaggerated or false claims about the technology, business and financial performance. The agency's account said the company generated just over $100,000 in operating revenue in 2014, despite a projection of more than $100 million. The SEC settled with Holmes on civil charges; the criminal convictions came later through a separate prosecution. Those distinctions matter in a film likely to place her own account beside the record established in court and the public claims that built Theranos. The SEC's original announcement lays out the civil allegations and settlement.

Fielder's involvement makes the camera's presence part of the subject. His work has repeatedly used staged situations and documentary conventions to test how people behave when they know they are being watched. Here, Holmes is both a convicted fraudster and a participant who invited the filmmakers in. Access can reveal routine and self-presentation; it cannot independently settle the technical and legal questions that have already been tested through records, regulators and a jury.

The film's title promises total visibility, while its subject is a company whose public claims outran what its machines could do. The trailer sells that tension without changing the underlying evidence about Theranos. The documentary's challenge is to show what its access adds to the existing account of Holmes, rather than letting intimacy stand in for verification.

Fielder said viewers can buy tickets through the film's ticketing site. A24's film listings identify Fielder and Oppenheim as directors. The release is scheduled for October 16th.