Amanda Seyfried is the “You Can See Everything” wild card

Somewhere in the last two decades, the spoiler became a cottage industry. While some journalists twisted their movie and television coverage around major plot events, others tackled them head-on, writing “ending explained” and “twist revealed” articles for readers who wanted to skip to the point. But like every staple in modern life, spoiler anxiety didn’t turn ubiquitous overnight, even if it might seem that way. Capitalism’s slowly tightening grip bound us to spoiler culture. As the economy became increasingly unstable and demanded that moviegoers and television aficionados devote more time to their jobs, the average viewer naturally had less bandwidth for their cultural hobbies. Combine that bleak outcome with the advent of DVR and social media — where any event can be discussed in depth, immediately — and boom: Bye bye, watercooler.

Anyone vigilant about spoilers has adapted their own methods of avoiding them. But occasionally, there’s just no way to keep something a secret once it’s out in the world. Case in point: The second-act surprise in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Given the film’s unprecedented access to notorious Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes before her 11-year prison sentence, it was already going to be a talker. But it’s a credit to the directors’ ingenuity that Holmes is simply the film’s introductory selling point. In reality — something that is already under constant speculation in the movie — it’s everything that happens after Holmes surrenders, slightly less than halfway through the three-hour runtime, that reveals “You Can See Everything” as the contemplative, shape-shifting chimera it is. 

When the documentary premiered in semi-secret at this fall’s Telluride Film Festival, viewers were asked not to reveal certain aspects in their reviews and reactions. This was, of course, unfeasible. In 2026, one can’t bring Amanda Seyfried, star of “The Dropout,” into the process of a Fielder-led documentary, show it to the public and expect that Seyfried’s presence will stay under wraps.

But this is simply another way for Fielder to toy with the viewer’s perception, lifting questions about secrecy, deception and the nature of truth from the heart of the film and dispersing them into the ether, like a kid blowing on a dandelion to make a wish. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a spoiler for “You Can See Everything.” The movie’s narrative turns are so self-contained that you could know every beat of the film and still be flabbergasted by how it all unfolds. Knowing this documentary exists — that a slippery figure like Fielder is going toe-to-toe with the equally shifty Holmes — is its own “spoiler.” Assuming that would be the case, I sought out the film’s “twist” in an early review, wanting to confirm if my suspicions about Seyfried’s involvement were true.

It turns out that sitting on that knowledge for a month only aided in my experience with the movie. Knowing Seyfried will eventually show up lets the viewer watch without shock, processing every moment she’s on screen without the last-minute textual analysis that would otherwise accompany a surprise like this. This spoiler isn’t a spoiler at all. Seyfried’s presence sets fire to all the ideas the film juggles up until her introduction. Gazing into that fantastic blaze, every viewer will see something different, something new with each watch. Holmes might be the person on the poster, but “You Can See Everything” isn’t anything without Seyfried.

While the film would’ve been compelling if it were composed entirely of the 30-some days Fielder and Oppenheim spent with Holmes and her egomaniac partner, Billy Evans, in their San Diego beach rental, it would’ve only scraped the surface of Holmes’ psyche. In that relatively short time, we come to understand many things about Holmes and Evans. She is specious (perhaps unintentionally so) and charming, sitting atop a transparent partition that separates her from reality, trying unsuccessfully to reach the atmosphere below. He is governing and loathsome, with a knack for manipulation that merely foreshadows what audiences witness in the film’s second half. 

This dual character study alone would give viewers plenty to contemplate in light of what they already know or assume about Holmes — most importantly that her fraud is unquestionably a product of being a woman in a violent, dehumanizing world. But as soon as she surrenders into custody, the rumination would halt. It would be much easier for someone to project their version of the truth onto Holmes. At the end of the day, that hypothetical version of the film would make for a very special, feature-length episode of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”; little more than a cultural curiosity, as opposed to the pool of lucid, viscous quicksand it is. But Fielder and Oppenheim wisely chose to wait it out, to see what they could uncover in time, even if it was nothing at all.

Two years later, enter Seyfried, who watches Fielder’s footage of Holmes watching Seyfried in “The Dropout” for the first time. Years removed from the project, her curiosity is clearly piqued. But what more is there to do besides lend additional color to the documentary? Fielder answers that question with his own questions, held over from the initial shoot. He wants to use Seyfried’s experience in playing a character to further investigate motive, reason, identity and truth. He wants to know more about why Holmes has chosen Evans, and what they both get from their relationship. But more than anything, he wants to understand Holmes as much as one person can possibly understand another — a patently impossible yet all-too-enticing undertaking.

As one of the finest, most challenging and surprising actors of her (or any) generation, Seyfried is game. An actor’s Faustian pact is that, by becoming someone else, they become more deeply acquainted with their true self and the nature of authenticity, a pursuit that can easily descend into rampant narcissism or crippling mental health crises. For Seyfried, who normally takes care to draw clear boundaries between her life and work — living on a farm and avoiding the usual trappings of celebrity — the task is ambitious and hazardous. And that risk is part of what makes “You Can See Everything” so gripping. By agreeing to whatever Fielder has in store, Seyfried willingly blurs the lines between art and reality. She’s engaging in a piece of phantasmagoric performance art with two raging megalomaniacs, suspecting humanity buried beneath their easygoing subterfuge. It’s both the opportunity of a lifetime and a descent into a pitch-black basement with nothing but the glow of her soul to light the way.

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Seyfried’s first order of business is to step back into the role of Holmes, recreating scenarios Fielder experienced with Holmes during production to explore the various, mercurial states of mind Holmes might’ve been in — or at least that’s what Fielder leads us to believe. Like “The Rehearsal,” the question of fact haunts these recreations. The lines he provides for Seyfried are not transcripts; they’re scripts. Seyfried and the audience must trust Fielder, while questioning that trust at every moment. Both are essential to scraping past the layers of artifice Holmes and Evans have built around themselves. Once faith hangs in the balance, Fielder can navigate the viewer and Seyfried through its opaque boundaries, taking all of us to Evans’ house for an uncomfortably intimate dinner. Here, Seyfried makes her first-ever contact with Holmes over a phone call from prison. After some time spent with Evans, her fear is as visible as her empathy for Holmes. She’s not quite sure what this means for any of them, much less herself.

Seyfried’s willingness not only to go to those uncomfortable places but to stay there is one of her great strengths as an actor. Plenty of performers will wax poetic about their methods, saying what they hope to achieve in their work — how hard they worked to identify with their character. But few convey those efforts as Seyfried can. Refusing to stop at investigating her characters alone, she’s interested in humanity as a whole, and where those roles fit into how our species operates. 

In the film’s final act, Fielder stages one last recreation, another scenario that may or may not have actually happened between him and Holmes during visiting hours at a Texas prison. Fielder shrewdly pairs the recreation with footage of Seyfried reading the script for the first time, intercutting between the two. There are no major revelations, yet the sequence is an edge-of-the-seat climax thanks entirely to Seyfried, wrestling with her work, her complicated feelings toward Holmes and her family, this project, womanhood, selfhood and identity’s fragility — all in real time.

Here, Seyfried’s participation poses new and obscenely complex questions about the intersection of fame and infamy. She wonders whether her performance as Holmes is instructive, destructive, or some form of both. What responsibility does she have for how Holmes is treated in prison, by the press, or by the public? None, she argues for a moment, until she peels away another layer. 

It’s critical to remember that Seyfried and Holmes are the only two women at the heart of this film. They are its entire feminine perspective. Both are mothers. Both are, to differing degrees, actors. And Seyfried — having seen the first half of the film before agreeing to participate in its latter portion; having spent time with Holmes’ repugnant partner — knows patriarchy is a key component of Holmes’ story, a tie that binds them. She might not have a responsibility to Holmes, but that doesn’t mean she can’t practice empathy toward her. 

Perhaps that’s a line other actors might not want to cross. But it’s another risk Seyfried is willing to take. A greater good is at stake beyond her own edification. Neither you nor I, nor Fielder or Oppenheim or Evans, can see everything. It’s all obscured by layers upon layers of fact, fiction, perception and question. Only Seyfried can get close enough to make out the reality underneath it all, and truth concerns her little. What matters most to her is the only thing that allows any of us to see each other: trust.