You Can See Everything Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Movies Documentaries are having a renaissance in movie theaters, even as the industry that makes them is struggling. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Oct 30, 20261:13 PM Photo illustration by Slate Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. A few days ago, I got a voice memo from my teenage daughter. That’s not such an unusual occurrence, but it was early morning on a school day, and the timing was unusual enough to cause a slight tremor of concern—especially since the voice I heard belonged to her homeroom teacher. Fortunately, it turned out that the subject of the call had nothing to do with my child. “I just saw You Can See Everything,” her teacher said. “I think it might be the best movie I’ve ever seen?” In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had conversations about Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s elusive documentary on the sidelines of field hockey games and in therapy sessions, in the middle of a haircut and while being handed a freshly brewed cortado. I’ve texted and DM’d and Slacked, watched strangers debate it on social media, and overheard them on subways and trolleys. I’m sure there’s a place where people aren’t talking about whether Elizabeth Holmes is really incapable of grasping the premise of “Who’s on First?,” but I’m not sure I know how to get there. With over $45 million in ticket sales after only two weekends, You Can See Everything is already the biggest documentary hit in years (decades, if you exclude concert movies and nature films), and it’s well on its way to becoming one of A24’s most successful releases ever—a cutting irony given that it comes a year after the company shut down its dedicated documentary division for good. It’s breaking out, oddly enough, at a particularly abysmal time for nonfiction cinema’s commercial prospects, when the bottom has fallen out of theatrical exhibition and the streaming boom that softened that blow has also come to an end. Even eminent filmmakers seem to have shifted to churning out true crime nonstop, and longtime fixtures in the field are going back to school in hopes of starting new careers. And yet despite the fact that the financial upside has all but vanished, there’s an astonishing wealth of great new documentaries, enough to fill out a bumper Top 10 list just with movies that have opened in the past couple of months. There’s no question that You Can See Everything owes a good deal of its stunning box-office success to the public’s long-standing fascination with Elizabeth Holmes, who went from being one of the tech boom’s most dramatic success stories to one of the 21st century’s greatest frauds, spawning a cottage industry of books, podcasts, and dramatizations, not to mention a documentary or two. But viewers who are drawn in by Holmes’ notoriety find themselves immersed in something unexpected, a close-up study of her relationship with her romantic partner, Billy Evans, and with Fielder, who becomes the movie’s central character, if only by default. As a comedian with a long history of luring unsuspecting members of the public into awkward situations, Fielder has a knack for homing in on fleeting discomfort instead of letting it pass. It’s only a few minutes into the movie when Billy takes a bowl of raw eggs that Elizabeth is listlessly beating out of her hands—purportedly so she can better focus on talking to Fielder, but also because he’s clearly convinced that she’s doing it wrong. In a normal social situation, most of us would let the moment slide, perhaps conferring with our partners on the way home. But Fielder stops the conversation dead to confront Evans, and that tells audiences that they not only can but should be looking around the edges of the frame, not just paying attention to what people are saying. It’s like having someone in the next seat lean over and whisper, Yeah, I saw it too. The egg scene is when audiences lock into what You Can See Everything is doing. It gives them permission to evaluate the film’s characters on their own terms, rather than just trying to understand what the movie wants us to think of them—in other words, to watch it like a documentary. The techniques that Fielder and Oppenheim use to construct their hall of mirrors, the metafictional trapdoors and self-conscious deconstruction, aren’t new to the form, or even close: The scene when Fielder watches and rewatches a clip of Holmes from earlier in the filming process, to pick just one example, echoes the scene, more than half a century old, in the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter in which the Rolling Stones gather around an editing table to revisit the fatal stabbing of a fan during one of their concerts, one incriminating frame at a time. Documentary-makers have been using the form to interrogate its own veracity for nearly as long as documentaries have been around (Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread sent up the authoritative pronouncements of ethnographic narrators in 1933), and scripted reenactments have been in the mix even longer. But You Can See Everything isn’t just playing to aficionados of cutting-edge nonfiction cinema. It’s bringing in casual viewers, people whose most recent experience of something calling itself a documentary might be under the “True Crime” tag on Netflix. And yet they are, to judge by the box-office numbers and my own experience sitting among them, getting it. I would wager that even the marketing whizzes at A24 have been taken aback by what a breakout success the movie—an experimental three-hour documentary by a cult comedy icon—has become, but there’s no question that it has achieved the kind of cultural saturation for which Hollywood publicity heads would sell their firstborn children. A great deal of the fun of watching You Can See Everything comes from having the rug constantly pulled out from under you. Fielder may not have a ringmaster’s personality, but he’s a showman at heart—a literal magician—and he loves catching audiences off guard, dazzling them with one preposterous reveal after another. But I also see viewers taking pleasure in simply observing characters who inhabit the same world as they do, free to draw their own inferences from offhand observations without the movie telling them that they’re important to the plot. I’ve seen elaborate conspiracy theories spun out of whether there’s actually coffee in Holmes’ various cups, and plenty of speculation about why Evans seems to have a terminal case of the sniffles in the movie’s second half (not to mention why in one scene he seems to be drinking a Celsius and a Spindrift at the same time). Myself, I fixate on a stray detail at the movie’s midpoint, when Fielder props his laptop up on a stack of books to show the footage he’s shot so far to a new participant. One of those books is called Dog Paintings, and I have questions. Is that a book about paintings of dogs, or about dogs that paint? Was it just sitting around on their coffee table, perhaps as a way to amuse unexpected guests, or did someone go looking for large-format books that would make for good propping, and seize the opportunity to get that title in frame? As I’ve watched the price of even a used copy soar above a hundred dollars, I’ve added a new query to my list: Am I not even the only one fixated on this book? The characters in You Can See Everything are a collection of freaks and weirdos—it says something that the most relatable person in the movie is a millionaire celebrity. And yet for as much open-mouthed gawking as it inspires, I suspect that part of what keeps audiences engaged is that those oddballs are still more recognizable than any of the characters in contemporary Hollywood movies. (Billionaire tech scammers: They’re just like us!) Running down the offerings at my nearest multiplex, the closest I can find to movies with characters who live in anything like the world I inhabit involve a demonic doppelgänger and a man getting swallowed by a whale. There’s no reflection of the world outside the movie theater, a world torn apart by political divisions and authoritarian power grabs, where people’s lives and livelihoods are threatened by rising costs and the overwhelming dominance of a tiny handful of tech billionaires. There’s nothing, in short, that feels like life. Escapist entertainment is one of Hollywood’s greatest callings, but even the glossy musicals of the Great Depression at least nodded occasionally to the reality they were helping audiences escape from. (When Fred Astaire sang “I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again,” people knew what it meant to fall face down in the dirt.) But if you want to see people struggling with what it feels like when the country they’ve loved their whole lives becomes a place they no longer recognize, you’ll have to turn to the Russian dissident journalists of Julia Loktev’s epic My Undesirable Friends, whose first part played for weeks on end at New York’s Film Forum despite its five-hour length. (Its nearly six-hour second half is playing there in its fourth week now.) If you want to hear Jewish people talking about the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza, you won’t find it on Netflix, but a slew of documentaries have taken on the conflict from every conceivable angle, and NAZA, whose interviews with Israeli military intelligence officials paint a sobering picture of the dehumanized nature of 21st-century warfare, has been leaving audiences sitting in stunned silence for a month. One in a Million, by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, spends 10 years following a family of Syrian refugees as they make a new home in Germany. As the family struggles to find a place for their strict religious beliefs in a liberal Western nation, the movie provides an empathetic window into a reality many Americans never see. And yet, over time, it also emerges as the story of the conflict between a father who sacrificed everything to give his daughter a new life and a child who, as she grows into maturity, finds the very freedom her father fought to give her becoming an insurmountable barrier between them. It’s a highly familiar story nestled within a more specific one, and a sterling example of the magic of long-term observational filmmaking, the kind that a tight funding environment has recently made all but obsolete. (So is You Can See Everything, whose makers accepted A24’s money only on the condition that they had the option to drop the project entirely if they couldn’t find a story they wanted to tell.) There’s a similar kind of slowly evolving heartbreak in Michal Marczak’s Closure, which tracks a Polish father’s search for his teenage son, which stretches on years after the boy was captured by security cameras on the edge of a bridge, contemplating the waters below. The obvious conclusion is that the boy died by suicide, but no body was ever found, so the father spends days and nights plumbing the water’s depths and untangling the snarls on its banks. It’s wrenching, and sometimes hard to sit with, but the movie finds a kind of beauty and even peace in the father’s quest, while challenging the idea that the potential loss of a loved one is something we can or even should put behind us. Once Upon a Time in Harlem was shot more than 50 years ago and focuses on events that took place half a century before that. Yet the movie, which was completed only this year, brings the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to vivid life, courtesy of a 1972 gathering at Duke Ellington’s apartment. David Greaves, the son of the documentary pioneer William Greaves, used recent technologies to finally complete his late father’s film (the elder Greaves died in 2014), including a jarring dash of generative A.I. What brings the movie alive isn’t just the chance to hear from the likes of the painter Romare Bearden and the composers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, but the way Greaves and his editors emulate the arc of a truly great party, starting slow, growing increasingly boisterous and convivial, and ending with the participants sounding just a little tipsy and rambunctious. (You can certainly tell which guests the rest are sick of hearing from.) The movie is enough of a crowd-pleaser that Mayor Zohran Mamdani bought out several opening-weekend screenings to let audiences see it for free, and in a year in which few films about Black Americans are even a whisper in the awards conversation, it’s an important reminder of the experiences Hollywood movies so often leave out. The title of John Wilson’s The History of Concrete seems almost purposefully designed to repel an audience’s interest. But it broke records when it opened at New York’s IFC Center, and if you call Wilson’s bluff, it’s not hard to see why. The movie stresses its director’s inability to make anything vaguely commercial, following him to a seminar where he learns the finer points of scripting a Hallmark romance, but even as he follows his superficially dull subject around the world, he’s subtly filling in a portrait of a working artist’s life: the small house he lucked into owning and now rents out floors of at below-market rates; the unglamorous money gigs, like shooting commercials for adult diapers, that pay the bills between passion projects; the cramped parties in friends’ apartments where noise-rock bands play music for the love of making it. It’s a life I’ve lived, one common to city dwellers looking for culture outside the boundaries of commerce and institutional approval, and yet I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it in a movie before, and certainly not one made by someone who still travels in those circles. I have to imagine it’s how many of the people who went to see Wilson’s movie live, and that in between all his quirky digressions and deliberate dead ends, they were moved to see people they recognized on a movie screen. Plenty of recent movies will take you to distant and fantastical lands and let you experience things you’ve never imagined. But a documentary might be the only place you can see yourself. Comedy Fraud Israel Movies Russia Syria Documentaries Palestine You Can See Everything