‘A cultural moment’: smash hit doc You Can See Everything continues to dazzle America

When I see a film a second time during its theatrical run, it’s typically to take someone else who hasn’t yet seen it, at least in part hoping to witness their reaction to a piece of art that excited or moved me in some way. Seeing Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything a second time in New York City on a Saturday night was that impulse writ larger. This is a movie garnering a surprisingly sizable audience, and outsized audience reactions to go along with it; rewatching it in a full 300-seat auditorium offered the opportunity to re-experience that sense of discovery. Perhaps more to the point, almost everyone I knew had seen it already; all I could do was observe strangers.

This documentary, peering into (and helping to create) a hall of mirrors around the famed med-tech scammer Elizabeth Holmes, has become the box office story of the fall, actually rising 25% on its second weekend to gross another $19.5m – a rare feat even given its expanded screen count. With over $45m in North America, it’s already one of A24’s biggest movies ever; it could wind up in the company’s top three, and way up on the list of the highest-grossing nonfiction features. If You Can See Everything isn’t quite an Obsession-level cash cow, it’s probably even more surprising that a three-hour documentary whose existence was only announced about eight weeks ago is on track to make more money than high-profile new releases like Practical Magic 2, Verity and Street Fighter, among others. It’s also outgrossed co-director Oppenheim’s fellow A24 surprise hit Primetime, which has the benefit of genuine movie star Robert Pattinson.

A few of the viewers I spoke with following the 8pm showing of You Can See Everything at New York’s AMC Empire (typically one of the highest-grossing venues in the country for any number of new releases, where Everything is currently showing on three to five screens depending on the time of day) had also seen Primetime, aware of the connection between the two films. Just as many, however, were not high-frequency moviegoers, at least not by New York standards. Despite an obviously youthful demographic – perhaps owing to the high tolerance for hustle and/or bustle required to trek out to Times Square, I couldn’t find anyone over 30 – there were several viewers who hadn’t been to the movies in months. (The answer to the question of what movie they last saw in theaters ranged from the month-old Primetime to the obligatory summer mega-blockbuster The Odyssey to, yes, Obsession.) Hardly anyone claimed to be a documentary aficionado, either; no one cited a recent documentary they had seen in theaters, saying they were more likely to catch that sort of thing on streaming, if at all.

So what drew them to a big-screen experience featuring both an entertainer (Nathan Fielder) and a subject (Elizabeth Holmes) more closely associated with television? Most of the twentysomethings I spoke with had some combination of familiarity with Fielder’s more overtly comic work – one woman said this seemed “on brand” for him – and awareness of the notoriety of Holmes, the latter usually stemming from the non-documentary TV series The Dropout, which also figures into the film. Each seemed to provide a surprise hook for a big-screen feature – like a more thoughtful version of seeing a movie because it has Anne Hathaway or Spider-Man (not that there’s anything wrong with following either of those into the dark). To a cinema diehard, this seemed almost counterintuitive; were people really being enticed into theaters by faces they knew largely from couch-bound TV binges? Was this effectively serving as a three-hour crossover between The Dropout and The Rehearsal?

There was a sense that this unexpected team-up was part of the sell, with the WTF nature of that idea intact. The extra promise, though, seemed to be that You Can See Everything would offer something more surprising and less easily spoiled than a typical streaming event. The 23-year-old sitting next to me said that she got the impression from social media – specifically, clips on Instagram and TikTok – that this was “a cultural moment”, as she put it. Multiple viewers echoed that sentiment about seeing a handful of clips via social media, and hearing buzz indicating that the movie simply was “unlike anything else out [at the movies]” and had to be seen firsthand to be believed - or at least to be experienced with the proper amount of spoiler-free, audience-vibing surprise. Remarkably, though the movie had been out for over a week and already discoursed at least halfway to death online, none of these twentysomething viewers reported having any idea about the unexpected pivot the movie made at its halfway mark – especially impressive given that it involves another marquee name added to the mix.

During the movie itself, that mystery guest felt like she was winning fans in real time; she even got a round of spontaneous applause by describing Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, as “batshit crazy”. But while early screenings had been described as meeting with rapturous audience engagement driven by the film’s surprises, this one felt more unpredictable in its alternating waves of laughter and murmuring discomfort. Early in the film, Holmes gets teary talking about the potential separation from her children as she prepares to leave for her prison sentence in a few weeks. Both times I’ve watched it with a full audience, Fielder’s reaction – “that must be hard” – drew one of the movie’s biggest laughs, seemingly for how flatly obligatory it sounds. Yet if this moment primed the audience for peals of cringe-comedy laughter or outright derision toward either Fielder’s affect or Holmes’s refusal to accept responsibility for her deception, that’s not exactly how the movie played out. The movie often cuts to Fielder lurking within proximity of the Holmes family during tense moments; though the mechanics of these de facto reaction shots are similar, sometimes they drew big laughs and sometimes what felt more like hushed suspense. It was as if viewers were deciding moment to moment whether they were watching dark comedy or something more menacing. Though the disparaging of Evans got an enthusiastically cathartic reaction, applause when the movie threw to its end credits was scattered and uncertain.

Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

It’s not unprecedented for a movie to garner audibly mixed reactions. But something Oppenheim and Fielder seem to have cracked is allowing an audience to feel satisfied and impressed by those reactions, which would often serve as a death knell to a prospective blockbuster. When I asked people after the show for their immediate impressions of the film, one woman said it was “funnier than I expected”, while another was surprised by the sympathy she felt for Holmes at times despite feeling “on guard” about what to believe from her.

The most common reaction, however, was a kind of admiring confusion. They weren’t exactly sure what to think, a feeling that’s not traditionally music to a film executive’s ears. Because its initial release was in fewer than a thousand theaters, You Can See Everything hasn’t been subjected to the traditional and finicky CinemaScore polling that asks opening-night audiences for a grade, and seems to inexplicably augur disappointment with anything that’s not at least a B+. But PostTrak, another polling service, shows highly positive results. This could carry the movie past the $100m mark in North America, something only ever accomplished by one other documentary: Michael Moore’s hot-button Fahrenheit 9/11, which had the advantage of election-year currency and a film-maker coming off an Oscar win.

Is this phenom, in conjunction with the surprise smash of Obsession and the less shocking but still staggering success of The Odyssey, indicative of movie audiences willing to grapple with more than they’ve been given credit for in the past? Or, along with the film’s three-hour runtime, is it more of an example of how traditionally TV-based projects are afforded a leeway that narrative films rarely receive from general audiences? As with the movie itself, clear answers haven’t emerged, and probably won’t. At very least, though, it offers some clear respite from the applause-mongering of the IP-driven, fan-focused era. Those movies won’t be banished by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, but by the time the next Avengers rolls around, they might feel, however slightly, like a narrower slice of the cinematic experience.