Beneath the elaborate detective work and almost forensic dissection of human behavior in You Can See Everything, I can’t help but sense a surprisingly tender, even mournful emotional core—one that Nathan Fielder seems to hide behind the film’s central conundrum: who’s deceiving whom?
To be honest, I left the cinema in tears. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by, amid all the investigative intrigue, a more personal reckoning with what it means to trust—NOT whether someone is ultimately worthy of our trust, but what becomes possible when we choose to trust someone, and what remains forever inaccessible when we don’t.
Early in the film, Nathan asks Elizabeth Holmes to revisit her relationship with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former romantic and business partner at Theranos who is 19 years older than her. By Liz’s account, she had surrendered enormous parts of her autonomy to a man she loved and trusted, only for that relationship to collapse following the downfall of everything they had built together.
What struck me the most was Liz’s reflections on her approach to that relationship, one characterized by, above all else, what you may call unconditional trust. Her rationale is simple but powerful:
“When you choose to trust someone so completely, if that trust proves justified, it can take you both somewhere far beyond what either of you could have reached while holding back.”
(or something along the lines of^)
Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is Elizabeth Holmes we’re talking about, a woman convicted of FRAUD, whose every expression of sincerity has become suspicious.
WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD SHE SAYS?
But bear with me. Let’s entertain, for a moment, that one of the many reasons why Nathan chose to keep that narrative of Liz in the documentary was precisely because Nathan wants us to engage as much with the possibility that there exists a version of reality in which her account IS truthful as one in which it is not. That Liz really did trust Sunny to that extent, that her surrender of autonomy was genuine, and that it contributed to consequences she could scarcely have imagined, that the deep, almost inseparable bond she now shares with her current partner Billy Evans through granting him power of attorney is equally real.
If we choose to accept these premises, even provisionally, what becomes astonishing is not that Liz could surrender herself to someone so completely in the first place.
It’s that she could make that all-in bet again.
Having just suffered the disastrous consequences of such absolute surrender, she was still willing to stake herself on merging with another person with seemingly undiminished conviction.
Is this evidence of an extraordinary capacity for love, or an equally extraordinary need to believe in such love she cannot afford to lose?
Perhaps both. But whatever its origins, I’m struck by the sheer magnitude of that willingness.
Perhaps one of the many ways Nathan wants us to feel about Elizabeth is how mind-blowing it is that someone who, having been so profoundly devastated, refuses to let that experience determine the limits of what she’s prepared to surrender again.
I suspect Nathan is captivated by this, too. Perhaps even secretly envious.
Throughout the film, Nathan presents himself as the consummate investigator: detached, skeptical, almost clinically perceptive. He probes contradictions, questions motives, and tries to get to the bottom of the elaborate stories people tell about themselves and one another. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that beneath this investigative persona runs a more private narrative that is more emotional than Nathan is willing to let on—one about his own relationship with intimacy, and perhaps his longing for something he doesn’t quite know how to attain.
I still remember this shot vividly: Nathan Fielder sits alone in his car, waiting for Liz and Billy on their final day together. Something about the portrayal of his solitude in that moment stayed with me.
Now let’s take a look at this shot in the context of other hints Nathan dropped throughout the film: passing references to his relationship struggles (his mention of recent breakup in his letter to Elizabeth), Amanda suggesting that he might make a good father, him pondering about the possibility of fatherhood, and so on.
The juxtaposition there feels quietly sad.
I wonder whether Nathan is secretly envious of Liz. Not necessarily of her circumstances, but of her apparent ability to surrender without requiring certainty first.
We have come to know Nathan as a man whose artistic practice revolves around dissecting human behavior and picking apart social conventions. Yet what if that very capacity for critical distance and deconstruction, has also kept him from experiencing the kind of profound, inseparable bond he finds himself observing? What if his tendency for skepticism, so indispensable to his work, has become a defense against the vulnerability that intimacy demands?
And then there’s us, the audience.
There’s something almost paradoxical about the position Nathan places us in. In several conversations with Liz, he shows us how Liz presents trust as something she can extend almost effortlessly, even after having paid dearly for it—or at least this is the version of herself she invites us to believe. Nathan, meanwhile, spends the film cultivating precisely the opposite instinct in us, as we’re repeatedly asked to decide what to believe: Is Liz deceiving everyone? Is Billy? Is Nathan himself manipulating our perception through the narrative he has constructed?
And this very position we find ourselves in parallels Liz’s situation in an ironic way. As audience, we are confronted with the same choices that Liz once faced in her relationships: do we choose to approach their story with trust, or do we choose to approach it with suspicion?
If we, as audience, choose to believe in Liz and Billy’s bond , we may witness an extraordinary, if deeply dysfunctional, story of devotion (or in their own words, “building monuments of love”, but If we choose to distrust it, the same gestures become evidence of utter manipulation, co-dependency, or self-deception.
But perhaps even this dichotomy is too neat. Perhaps love and manipulation are NOT necessarily mutually exclusive.
Someone can sincerely love another person while also exploiting them, controlling them, or participating in a shared system of denial. A relationship can be both deeply meaningful and profoundly dysfunctional. Its tenderness need not absolve it of its cruelty; its cruelty need not render every moment of tenderness disingenuous.
The muddiness of it all is what makes the question of trust so difficult in the first place. We want to believe that underneath all the contradictions lies a single, coherent truth about who someone really is. That if we could only expose the deception and artifices, we would finally know whether the love was real.
But what if there is no such clean distinction to be made? What if the answer is ultimately unknowable? What if sincerity and calculation, devotion and self-interest, are not competing explanations but inseparable parts of the same human experience?
If that’s the case, then the problem is NOT simply that we haven’t looked closely enough. It’s that no amount of looking may give us the kind of definitive answer we’re searching for.
We might uncover every lie, reconstruct every interaction, account for every injury, and still be unable to settle what these people ultimately mean to one another. Evidence can establish what happened, even who bears responsibility, without necessarily resolving what was FELT.
Which brings me to the title itself: You Can See Everything.
It’s an extraordinary promise, and perhaps an impossible one.
You can live in someone’s home, film their most intimate moments, reconstruct conversations. You can keep looking, keep questioning, keep peeling away the layers of a story.
But even if you can see everything, you may still not understand.
Because seeing everything is not the same as understanding everything.
And understanding everything is not a prerequisite for LOVING someone.
Because this is where the limits of knowledge become something more than an intellectual problem. To love another person is, in some measure, to act without possessing the complete picture. One must decide whether to enter, remain in, or leave a relationship without ever knowing with certainty what lies at the bottom of another person’s heart. No amount of scrutiny can entirely relieve us of that decision.
The film’s final moment ultimately returns us to a scene of Liz and Billy with their two children—a family they have managed to build together, despite, or perhaps through, the extraordinary circumstances that brought them there.
Of course, their having built a life together proves NEITHER the purity of their devotion NOR the health of their relationship. But, if we take their bond seriously, there is something profoundly moving about the fact that, for all the contradictions and uncertainties surrounding them, they have nevertheless chosen a kind of extraordinary commitment whose meaning cannot be exhausted by an outsider’s account of it and continues beyond Nathan’s frame of investigation.
Because at the end of the day, whatever Nathan or the audience makes of their relationship, the experience of living it belongs to them alone.
Meanwhile, Nathan remains outside that intimate world, literally and narratively. He can observe it, question it, reconstruct it. But he can NOT fully inhabit it. Is this also a secretive lament about his own solitude?
While there is no way to confirm it, I find something poignant in the contrast between a man standing outside a relationship trying to understand it, and two people who have chosen to live inside one despite its unknowability.
The tragedy of the genius detective, perhaps, is that he can see through everything, but risks losing sight of anything worth believing in.
Yet the film complicates this possibility, too. Later, Amanda wonders whether Nathan has been trying to protect Liz, whether he worries about the film hurting her. Nathan, characteristically, denies it. Amanda’s response: it’s complicated.
I love that he chose to leave that exchange in. It hints at an emotional investment his detached persona seems almost designed to conceal:
The detective may not be as disinterested as he’d like us to believe.
And this hidden footnote may be the film’s attempt to offer a way out of the apparent opposition between Liz and Nathan.
The detective’s journey need NOT be to abandon his questions and embrace unconditional belief. It might instead be to discover that questioning and caring can coexist. That recognizing another person’s contradictions need not preclude our affection for them; that acknowledging the possibility of manipulation need not require us to deny the possibility of Love. We can retain our judgment without allowing it to become an insurmountable barrier between ourselves and the world of love, however .
So, if you ask me, what the film’s most unsettling proposition is, here’s what I’ll say: Trust isn’t always the conclusion of an investigation. Sometimes it’s what we choose to extend when investigation has taken us as far as it can. Trust stands NOT as a refusal to see what is in front of us, nor a guarantee that our faith will be rewarded, but a willingness to remain open to a kind of possibility—the possibility that to experience certain kinds of love, we must eventually accept that there are things we will never know.
And that sometimes, the most consequential thing we can do is choose to believe anyway.