It’s 2026, and Australians are still waiting weeks for the world’s biggest pop culture moment to reach our cinemas.
You Can See Everything, the wildly buzzed-about documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, opened in the US on October 16. Australian audiences don’t get it until November 12, with select advance screenings at independent cinemas on November 11.
Call it an old habit dying hard. For many, many years, Australians waited weeks, months or sometimes years for American films and TV to land here. Streaming and simultaneous ‘fast-tracked’ global releases were supposed to have fixed that. Apparently, not always.
So what is everyone overseas getting so worked up about?
You Can See Everything follows Holmes, 42, in the weeks before she reported to federal prison in 2023 to begin serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding Theranos investors. The blood-testing start-up she founded was once valued at $US9 billion (about $14 billion), before it emerged its technology never actually worked.
Holmes’ downfall has already been chronicled in the 2019 documentary The Inventor and the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout, which starred Amanda Seyfried. This time, Holmes chose who told her story: comedian Nathan Fielder and documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, who co-directed the film and spent three years filming her, her partner Billy Evans and their two children.
If the name Nathan Fielder means nothing to you, here’s the primer. He’s the deadpan Canadian comedian behind Nathan For You and HBO’s The Rehearsal, two shows built almost entirely around blurring the line between what’s staged and what’s real.
He also co-created The Curse, the 2023 Showtime series starring Emma Stone, which was marketed as a comedy but, according to co-creator Benny Safdie, “started out as a 30-minute comedy and became an hour-long comedy-drama”. So the “comedy or documentary” question has followed Fielder through most of his career.
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You Can See Everything is being billed as a straight documentary, but early reviews suggest it’s anything but conventional. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman described it as a “reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus”, and The New York Times has written that the film “upends the genre itself”.
Fielder himself seems unsure what to make of it. At the film’s surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September, he told the audience he was still “struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced” while making it.
At 174 minutes, the film is nearly three hours long and is rated M in Australia for mature themes, coarse language, nudity and sexual references.
There’s already Oscars chatter attached to it, with some critics suggesting it could be the first documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. Whether that happens or not, Australians will just have to wait that little bit longer to judge for themselves.
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Where to watch in Australia
You Can See Everything opens in Australian cinemas on November 12, with advance screenings at select cinemas on November 11.
