Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc Shakes Up the Oscar Race

For three days, the Telluride Film Festival ran on a single unknown rumor. By Sunday night, the line outside the Werner Herzog Theatre had swelled into the longest of the weekend, phones were sealed in locked pouches, a security team worked the aisles in night-vision goggles and a Telluride programmer took the stage to warn the crowd, only half-joking, that anyone who spoiled what came next was no longer loved. Then the mystery that had consumed the mountains finally broke. The secret screening was “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and the room came apart.

A24 confirmed it the same night as the movie hit play, dropping a teaser and announcing an October theatrical release, which means the guessing game is over and the awards conversation has begun. With that release date, the studio has planted a 172-minute nonfiction epic squarely in this season’s documentary feature race — and it arrives as the rare title that critics and attendees started debating immediately after the credits finished.

Thirty-four days before she reported to prison, Holmes invited a skeptical crew inside her home to record her every move. What began as a portrait of a convicted felon became a three-year descent that A24’s own logline calls a journey “into the abyss.” Hollywood has chased the Theranos saga for years — Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor” got there in 2019, Hulu’s “The Dropout” won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy and a Jennifer Lawrence vehicle from Adam McKay collapsed before it could even start shooting — but no one has approached Holmes the way these two filmmakers do.

That is the first reason to take this seriously as a contender. Fielder is the most restlessly inventive nonfiction mind in television, coming off a second season of “The Rehearsal” that earned Peabody recognition and an Emmy nomination for writing and “You Can See Everything” is his feature directing debut. Oppenheim, meanwhile, is having the festival run of his life — his first scripted feature, the Robert Pattinson thriller “Primetime,” bowed in Venice to a rapturous response — and his nonfiction pedigree (“Some Kind of Heaven,” “Ren Faire,” “Spermworld”) gives the project a formal rigor that Fielder’s persona-driven work does not always foreground.

The pairing is the story. Two artists obsessed with how the camera warps the thing it records, turned loose on the most studied liar of the century.

The craft is what builds an awards case, and this one is stacked. Shot by David Bolen — the “Some Kind of Heaven” and “Thelma” cinematographer who also lensed Oppenheim’s “Primetime” — the film trades the filmmakers’ usual anamorphic gloss for a boxed-in 4:3 frame and long zoom lenses that let two operators drift through a family home like ghosts, but ones the families clearly acknowledge and want as part of their story. Editor Adam Locke-Norton, Fielder’s collaborator of two decades, sustains conversations well past the point of comfort, letting non-answers hang in the air. And Ari Balouzian, the composer and one-third of the soul trio Gabriels, threads a noir score through the domestic footage that turns a beach house into a crime scene of the mind.

In a documentary field where craft branches increasingly reward ambition, all three are legitimate below-the-line conversation starters.

Then there is the thing itself, which plays less like a true-crime doc than a controlled experiment in whether a viewer can tell honesty from performance. Fielder does not stay behind the lens for long. Drawn into the frame by his subjects and by his own need to interject, he becomes the film’s destabilized center — a filmmaker visibly struggling, in real time, to work out whether he is being played.

The result is a movie that keeps escalating in strangeness across its three-year span and lands a final movement that had Telluride’s most seasoned attendees walking out shell-shocked. “Wild” and “WTF?” were the words circulating on the gondola line, and they were compliments.

Which brings us to the hurdles, because they are significant. The documentary branch has never fully made peace with participatory, comedy-adjacent nonfiction and voters who prize the observational and the earnest may recoil from a film in which the director is this present and this implicated.

There are obviously lingering questions about how much of it is “scripted” — which will spark debates over whether an acting nomination can come from such a movie, because the central performance that surprises in the film is, in fact, eligible for Oscar recognition, Variety has confirmed, although not for SAG.

A24 insiders see hurdles in the documentary branch, which is why they’re eyeing this film as a — wait for it — Best Picture play. And why the hell not?

With A24’s arsenal of contenders this year — which could include the summer hit “The Invite,” the Cannes breakout “Club Kid” and the Telluride debut smash “The Debut” — is there a real path for the indie studio to challenge the record for the most Best Picture nominations by a single studio in one year?

That record belongs to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which landed five at the ninth Academy Awards in 1937. A24 still has Chris Rock’s “Misty Green” to come out of Toronto, and it just dropped the aforementioned “Primetime” at Venice.

MGM achieved the feat when the Academy was nominating 10 films in the Best Picture category. “The Great Ziegfeld” was the big winner, taking home three statues. It was joined by four other MGM releases from 1936: “Libeled Lady,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “San Francisco” and “A Tale of Two Cities.”

At the time, MGM was the undisputed heavyweight in Hollywood, home to top talents such as Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer. So expansive was the A-list roster that the studio famously boasted it had “more stars than there are in heaven.”

But the bigger record is hidden inside all of this.

A documentary has never been nominated for best picture across 98 ceremonies. When the Academy expanded the field to as many as 10 nominees in 2009, it pointed to exactly this kind of nonfiction (and animated) filmmaking as newly able to compete. Seventeen years later, it still hasn’t happened for documentaries; only three animated films have ever cracked the category.

A Best Picture nomination for “You Can See Everything” wouldn’t merely pad A24’s tally — it would make history as the first documentary ever nominated for the Academy’s top prize.

The 172-minute runtime is a genuine ask. And there is the subject herself: Platforming a convicted fraudster, even to interrogate her, invites the accusation of handing Holmes a stage and any campaign will have to make the case — loudly — that the film indicts rather than rehabilitates.

The smartest defense is baked into the movie’s DNA. This is not a redemption tour. It is a study of the impossibility of ever knowing what is real, which is either the perfect subject for a branch that fetishizes authenticity or a provocation aimed straight at it.

A24 has the muscle to fight that fight. The studio has run documentary campaigns before and knows how to convert festival heat into a shortlist slot, and the fall precursor calendar gives it a runway — the Gotham Awards, the IDA Documentary Awards, Critics Choice Documentary, Cinema Eye Honors and the DGA’s documentary prize all feed the Oscar shortlist and a film this discussed will not want for coverage.

The October release is early enough to build, and the Fielder factor guarantees a level of press attention most nonfiction contenders would kill for.

The bottom line is that the documentary race, whatever shape it was taking a week ago, now has to reckon with this. A movie about the impossibility of trust, made with the person least equipped to earn it, dropped without warning into a festival built on the honor system — the metaphors write themselves, and so, most likely, will the ballots of a lot of voters who cannot stop thinking about it.

“I’m not that person,” Holmes insists in the teaser. “I can promise you that.”

By the time the lights came up in Telluride, nobody in the room was sure whether to believe her.