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Saying You Can See Everything is disorienting is putting it too mildly. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s up-close-and-personal documentary about Elizabeth Holmes has left audiences shattered and confused, not only about its subject but about the very nature of reality itself. This hyperstylized documentary flings viewers into a hall of mirrors, examining far more than the infamous Theranos health-tech scandal and revealing more of ourselves than anything else. The filmmakers try everything in their power to give us a clear picture, zooming in on the sweat, chapped lips, and pores of its subjects, yet any semblance of authenticity and truth seems to evade these investigations. Even after its three-hour run time, we’re left feeling we’ve barely scratched the surface at all.
In the spirit of the film’s slippery gaze, general “Who the hell is this guy?” emotions, and “Wait, what just happened?” moments, here are five movies that give us that same feeling: that we don’t know anything at all, even ourselves.
F for Fake (1973)
Directed by Orson Welles
Can we really know if anything is real? Does authenticity exist, or are we looking in vain for answers? Orson Welles crafted a 90-minute video essay that explores these ideas 50 years before Oppenheim and Fielder set out to ask these same questions. Welles stars in his docudrama F for Fake (1973), which purports to narrate the biography of Elymr de Hory, a famous art forger. What unfolds, however, strays far from traditional history, morphing instead into a meditation on authenticity and observation, with Welles’s attention latching onto Croatian actress Oja Kodar and Clifford Irving, an author known for a hoax biography.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Directed by Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze’s debut feature film, Being John Malkovich, orbits one problem: a person’s insatiable and impossible desire to escape his reality. The forlorn puppeteer, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), wants exactly that. Instead, he finds a portal into John Malkovich’s mind—a space he can inhabit for 15 minutes before being ejected onto the New Jersey Turnpike. (Crucially, Malkovich plays himself.) This absurd film taps into the same anxiety as You Can See Everything. If your life’s gone to shit, can you forge a new one? Likely not without extreme consequences.
Grizzly Man (2005)
Directed by Werner Herzog
The titular “Grizzly Man” is Timothy Treadwell, an outdoorsman who treats the Alaskan wilderness like his home. He sees the world, well, differently than your everyday hiker. He believes he can befriend some of the most dangerous beasts on the planet—only to discover the horror of this world. Herzog’s meditation on how strangely we each see the world fits in the vein of Fielder’s own exploration of the human capacity for empathy.
Free Solo (2018)
Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
A key part of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary about a free-solo climber, Alex Honnold, is how the climber experiences fear. It’s extraordinary. For those who don’t know what “free solo” means, it’s a style of climbing without any gear. In Free Solo, we watch as Honnold prepares to climb El Capitán in Yosemite National Park, a 3,200-foot vertical rock face. This endeavor warrants a documentary, but the filmmaker dives deeper, probing his relationship with his then-girlfriend and his uncanny intrepidity. You truly cannot believe he almost doesn’t see the risk, only the joy of the sport.
Adaptation (2002)
Directed by Spike Jonze
Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman first intended to write a screen adaptation of Susan Orlean’s acclaimed book The Orchid Thief. He struggled immensely, beating himself up over writer’s block and his inability to make a movie free of Hollywood tropes. But then he reworked the project, creating a semi-biographical screenplay about his own struggles with writing it. Adaptation, also directed by Spike Jonze, follows a semi-fictionalized Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) as he spirals over the creative undertaking. This rich metatextual film challenges ego, particularly with Cage playing Kaufman’s twin brother as well, an optimistic foil that challenges him at every turn.
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