The patients harmed by Elizabeth Holmes blood testing company Theranos are back in focus after a surprise documentary, You Can See Everything, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend. The film, from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim and distributed by A24, follows Holmes for three years, covering the 34 days before she went to prison. It is a portrait of the person rather than a straight retelling of the fraud.
Before getting into the documentary, it is worth revisiting what Theranos actually did to real people, because the human impact of the Elizabeth Holmes blood testing scandal is easy to lose behind the courtroom drama and Silicon Valley spectacle.
What Theranos patients actually experienced
At Holmes’s trial in 2021, three people gave testimony about receiving false medical results from Theranos devices. One woman testified she was told she was having a miscarriage when her pregnancy was entirely healthy. She confirmed this through two subsequent tests at a different lab. Another woman testified that a Theranos test indicated she had HIV antibodies. She took two follow-up tests at separate labs and tested negative for HIV both times.
A third person testified that a 2015 Theranos blood test gave him inaccurate results about his blood’s clotting. Acting on that false result, he stopped taking his blood thinners. That is not a minor administrative error. That is a medical decision with serious potential consequences, made on the basis of data that was not reliable.
One of the patients also described trying to get answers from Theranos directly. She managed to reach customer service and was told they ‘couldn’t transfer me and that was about it.’ No doctor. No scientist. Just a dead end on the phone.
Theranos had sold investors on the premise that its technology could run hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood. The company eventually collapsed after reporting revealed the technology did not work as claimed.
Holmes guilty verdict and the Elizabeth Holmes blood testing documentary
According to The New York Times, Holmes was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was acquitted on four counts related to defrauding patients. She was later sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
What makes You Can See Everything different from previous treatments of this story is that Holmes actually participated. According to The New York Times, she invited the camera crew into her rented home in Southern California, giving the filmmakers access to her daily life across three years. That is a different proposition from the dramatisations and retrospective interviews that have previously defined how this story has been told on screen.
Variety reports the film runs 174 minutes, which is serious screen time for a documentary. That length gives Fielder and Oppenheim room to let the access breathe rather than compress everything into a highlights reel of courtroom moments. The focus, by all accounts, is the person, not the procedural.
The film’s premiere had its own unusual conditions attached. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Telluride Film Festival turned its mystery Sunday slot into a phone-free event for the screening. Given the subject matter, that feels appropriate: a company built on secrecy and misdirection, presented to an audience that had to put their devices away.
The fraud the jury convicted Holmes on was ultimately wire fraud against investors, not the patients who received false results. Those patients were acquitted counts. But the testimony from those three people at trial is a direct account of what Elizabeth Holmes blood testing technology meant in practice for the individuals on the receiving end of those results: a woman told her pregnancy was ending when it was not, another told she had HIV when she did not, and a man who adjusted his medication based on data that was wrong. The documentary covers the 34 days before Holmes went to prison. The patients’ testimony already covered the years before that.