This has blatant spoilers for the movie You Can See Everything, and also assumes that you have seen the movie. I will just jump straight into my thoughts, and I’m just assuming you know what I’m talking about. You can read the Wikipedia summary if you want to learn what it is about.

I saw the documentary You Can See Everything over the weekend and I truly feel as though I am losing my mind. I found it to be wholly uninteresting and exceedingly boring, and yet I have not been able to find anyone in person or online who agrees with me. It is one of the highest rated movies of all time on review websites, and people say they were at the edge of their seat the whole time or couldn’t restrain their gasps at certain scenes. I can’t tell if the entire world is delusional, or if I am unknowingly a victim of the literacy crisis.

One thing I did like: Nathan is very funny, and I love his very dry sense of humor and his comedic timing. I will definitely be looking for an opportunity to say “I’m not a great communicator; I don’t know that many words. Are you like that?“.

I read a small bit about Elizabeth Holmes and her whole saga on the drive to the theater, and I do find fraudsters and scams interesting, but the movie didn’t cover that at all. I didn’t recognize Nathan by name, but I have seen clips of him, and his absurd, dry comedy is really up my alley. I thought the movie would be about how she was able to convince investors to give her money, the lengths she went to to defraud them, and how she was able to escape investigation for so many years, but I was so wrong.

To me, the whole first half before she went to jail was very boring. Elizabeth maintains her innocence and that she hasn’t told any lies, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary. The filmmakers never call out her lies, they just move on. It’s not very surprising nor interesting that the convicted liar lies, yet this was drawn out for over an hour (I know because I was frequently checking the time to see when it would be over). The whole movie dances around the idea that she could be innocent, which is insane because she so clearly is not if you read any details of her case.

The big twist that everyone online is talking about (at least I think this is what they mean) is when it’s revealed that Billy negotiated for a portion of the profits of the movie beforehand. This is then again flipped at the end credits to say the deal was changed and he wouldn’t receive money. I think they’re trying to make this whole point that you can’t trust the documentary itself to be truthful, which might’ve been interesting to me in third grade when I learned about fact vs. opinion and bias, but is not really a revelation to say “wow maybe the filmmakers have their own perspective,” when I assumed that was the case from the start.

The second half focused more on Billy and how he’s just an insane person, but there isn’t really much more to it than that. Their relationship is very strange, but raising a family while the mother is in prison is obviously hard, so if they want to manage it like that, that’s fine I guess.

I’ve seen people say that it’s brilliant because “you can see everything” but still come away learning basically nothing, but so much of it is just bad interviewing. So many conversations basically went

Nathan: “Did you do this thing?”

Elizabeth (lying): “No” or “I don’t know”

Nathan: “Oh ok guess that’s it then.”

Like what? And then literally no follow up to anyone? The crazy liars continue to be crazy liars, it’s just not an interesting story.

The actor Amanda was brought to reenact parts that they didn’t get to film, but they also have her give her opinion and talking to Elizabeth and Billy, which is just so odd. While I was watching it I thought she kinda played the role of the audience since she was the first viewer of the documentary before it was released, but why should I care at all about her personal opinions on Elizabeth?

The movie also did this whole bit about whether Elizabeth said that the Hulu show “portrayed a character that I created” (versus “they” created). I haven’t seen the show, but I’m told that it portrays her unambiguously as a deceitful liar. I think this quote from the New York Times is so meaningless, but it gets a substantial amount of discussion in the movie. People can misspeak all the time, it doesn’t really matter, but we can analyze the cases:

I created: If she said “I”, she is upset that they take her public life and extrapolate that into what her private life is like. She was a very public CEO of what was one of the fastest growing businesses, of course she has a public persona that doesn’t really reflect who she is.

They created: It’s a TV show, obviously they created a character and dramatized her real life, and it would make sense that she would be upset or offended if it makes her look bad. It relates back to the idea I think they were going for that movies don’t display reality, which is such a juvenile, basic theme I just don’t see why people say it’s so deep.

Either way, I don’t see why this was given so much attention, it’s such a non-issue.

The very end, maybe even the very last line if I remember, is Amanda saying that maybe Nathan’s vision is clouded because he cares for her, which again calls into question the bias of the movie, but again, I was taught in third grade to always consider the author’s bias.

I don’t understand why they filmed everything so zoomed in on the faces, to the point where you could see the pores and wrinkles on their skin and the veins in their eyes. The music was also eerie. There was nothing really creepy going on, and zooming in like that is just such an odd choice to do for the literal entirety of the film. They were clearly trying to make you feel uncomfortable, but I just can’t understand why. It was so artificial and detached from everything else and the content of the movie.

I also see a lot of people saying how they came away and they just can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake. I genuinely have no idea what they are talking about; her story is extremely simple and cut and dry. She lied about her company to attract investors and give her money, she made tons of money, eventually was investigated and found to be lying, and she along with her business partners are serving a ten year long sentence. I’m not sure what people are confused about, or what else there is.

If I am genuinely stupid, misinterpreting things, or just otherwise missing something, please let me know, because I am straight up losing my mind over how awful I thought this movie was and the response I see online.