You Can See Everything | Official Trailer HD | A24<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nPOSITIVES<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Capitalizing on the cultivated buzz from one of the year’s most memorable teaser trailers, You Can See Everything is a boundary-pushing, reality-bending chronicle that not only accessibly navigates Holmes final days before her eventual incarceration, but also reinvents the wheel as an unconventional documentary that deviates remarkably on the path of audience expectations, enriching one of the most compellingly uncomfortable experiences that you’re sure to have at the theater in recent memory. Fresh off of his artistic experimentation with last month’s ‘Primetime’, Oppenheim once again pitches an impossibly involving engagement that leaves the audience constantly guessing, both with the intimately invasive techniques of the documentation, featuring limitless access to Holmes family during some of the most tumultuously humbling moments in their lives, but also this enticingly engrossing brand of atmosphere that complexes every emotional outpouring that audiences would expect during these surreal conversations, where even with so many unearthed revelations between those involved, there’s still this ungraspable artificiality to the ways that Elizabeth and Billy communicate to the camera. As a result, Oppenheim’s atmosphere feels directly plucked under the learning tree of David Fincher, particularly his time helming The Social Network, where between an edgier series of instrumental themes from composer Ari Balouzian, as well as Oppenheim’s own reveling in the grey area of morality that is never stabilized with any easily alleviating answers, enriches the experience with enough honesty and respect for its audience to convey the whole story, and considering production for the film began back in 2023, there’s a lot of evidential time and energy that went into fully realizing it, helping to produce one of the very best films of the year on anyone’s short list. Oppenheim brings along his coveted cinematographer from ‘Primetime’, in David Bolen, who in utilizing a tightly claustrophobic 4:3 boxed aspect ratio, as well as a rich versatility between anamorphic lenses and three-camera, fly-on-the-wall surveillance, conjures these ominously beautiful shots that linger subconsciously at the interpretation of the audience, providing a stylishly sleek canvas that intoxicatingly disarms before it devastates, with something akin to a legitimate feature length productional presentation at its splendor. While furthering praises towards the production, the editing here from Adam Locke-Norton is nothing short of mesmerizing, as so much about his consistency in relaxed cuts revels in this alarming awkwardness that often transpires between Nathan and his minimal assortment of guests, where his deliberate prolonging musters the kind of sizzling tension that elevates the inevitable confrontation to these interactions. Because Oppenheim and Fielder aren’t exactly enacting a narrative-based brand of driven storytelling, complete with overhead narration and testimonials from those involved, it allows Adam artistic free range to embellish relentlessly in the bewildering bizarreness of the film’s many spontaneous talking points, in turn allowing more of an untouched and uncut integrity of scenes that certainly goes a long way towards padding out its nearly three hour runtime. The ambitious approach of these minutes might provide challenging for those not immediately engrossed to what the magnetizing themes of the instability of truth and the performance of identity are ultimately enforcing, however Fielder and Oppenheim combine to appraise intricate value to the overall integrity and opportunity of every moment, that allows much of the movie’s first half to transpire with effortless ease to its smoothly subliminal pacing consistency, with the final moments of the first half leading directly up to Elizabeth’s incarceration. This is normally where a documentary would end, as the lack of access to our protagonist leaves very minimal options to keep things going for another 85 minutes, however this is merely where the complexities begin, as a second half blurring of the line between the arts and reality not only unloads some surprising guests who lend their credibility to those privatized moments that Billy doesn’t want captured on camera, but also thoroughly dissects the possible notion of Elizabeth being a victim to her own intellectual misunderstanding, in turn indulging in some avenues of exploit towards Billy and her family that honestly appraised some unexpected empathy in me for her. This is not to say that the movie is out to entirely clear Elizabeth’s name, as it more than coherently illustrates the deceptive means of her practices, but rather that it’s clear that Nathan has a bit of admiration and concern for her as a friend, despite his preconceived feelings of her being guilty of everything that she’s been convicted of, and through some riveting realizations with the media’s own manipulative tactics, the latest in glaring red flags for Artificial Intelligence, and the exaggerated dramatization of television, the film meticulously measures the proverbial deck that is against Elizabeth and any figure of authority that has been tried just like her, leading to a thought-provoking and riveting conversation starter that will only grow the film’s detectable impact, long after the film has concluded, leaving plenty of stimulating substance for both Nathan and the audience to chew on. Speaking of Nathan, he’s undeniably the single greatest strength that plays out on-screen in the movie’s favor, where his aridly dry dead-pan deliveries and unapologetically honest facial registries surmise an abundance of laughs that makes this perfect for a theatrical engagement involving a big audience. Part of what I love about Nathan’s summoning here is not only his fearlessness to ask the hard-hitting questions, that other college-bred journalists would crack under the pressure of asking, but also a stickler for the sequencing of events that he frequently recreates throughout the movie’s second half, in order to practice what he preaches with regards to sought-after factual accuracy from the media. As a result, Nathan opens up vulnerably willing and able to perform however the film depicts him, with his five weeks as a houseguest hilariously feeling like it weighs heavily on the privacy of those he’s intruding upon as some nosey creep with a camera, despite their invitational approval giving him access to everything he needs, and with his aforementioned flabbergasted responses being valued as such an integral part of the chess game candidness between he and Elizabeth, especially, his on-screen inclusion remarkably does wonders towards punching up the increasing effectiveness of his daggered deliveries, where very rarely does Nathan use aggression to humble those he comes into contact with, instead weaponizing the words of their audacious responses against them with the kind of eye-opening humility that lingers restlessly with shared silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NEGATIVES<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If my minimal nitpicks got the better of anything in the film, it’s definitely in the aforementioned three hour runtime, not particularly with the overstuffed abundance of talking points and memorable scenes between Nathan and the couple, but rather the long-winded form of some frivolously additional moments pertaining to the backstory of Theranos, the very company that Elizabeth exploited for wire fraud and conspiracy, as well as some uncomfortably private time with Billy that reveals more about him than I ever wanted or needed. Part of me is forgiving of this aspect, as everything explored here paints towards the discomforting atmosphere that Oppenheim revels in remorselessly, however some of these long-winded moments definitely could’ve used a tighter hold over the editing, in order to keep the dialogue from repeating so many of the manifested talking points already discussed within that very same scene, in turn leading to less exposition-heavy scenes that will draw out the patience of those less enamored by the overall experience. On this very same front, while both halves definitely kept me captivated continuously throughout, there’s no denying that I found the first half to be more rewarding to the interpretation, where the suffocating time spent with Nathan in the household of the couple exceeds some of the more artistically ambitious approaches of the second half involving more outsiders to the story. While I commend the film extraneously for deviating away from the formulaic approaches of many documentaries before it, there are some unavoidable impossibilities in Elizabeth’s own incarceration that ultimately and unfortunately keeps her conversations with Nathan free from transpiring on-camera, and though the film does effectively execute it in a unique way that offers some profound substance to the ways that art often imitates life, it’s simply no equal substitute for realizing them with the people involved, leaving a bit more distance than appreciated with an ending that involves a lot of questions and very few answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OVERALL
‘You Can See Everything’ is a hypnotically heart-pounding and provocatively dizzying contemporary masterpiece that not only deliciously deconstructs the derivative structure of documentaries before it, but also allows opportunistically limitless aim at a morally complex figure at its forefront, offering a sharp and stuffily surreal extended stay that is gut-busting cringe comedy at its most uncomfortably enticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My Grade: 9.5 or A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Directed By Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim Starring – Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans The Plot – Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9984"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9986,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9984\/revisions\/9986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefilmfreak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}