Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes film is chasing a best picture first

A24 put a film into the Telluride Film Festival without telling anyone what it was. You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, turned out to be about Elizabeth Holmes, and it has reorganised the Oscar race in a week.

The setup is in the logline. Thirty-four days before she was due in prison, the Theranos founder invited a sceptical crew to film her, and what began as a portrait ran on for three years, as NBC News reported. The footage includes Holmes with her partner Billy Evans and their two children at a rental house in San Diego in her last days before she began her sentence in 2023.

There is a twist that the audience was asked to keep. Conversations Fielder had with Holmes off camera, including inside the federal prison in Texas, are re-created with an actress whose identity becomes part of the film. Telluride attendees were asked not to name her.

Why A24 is aiming at best picture

No documentary has been nominated for best picture. Not once in 98 ceremonies.

When the Academy widened the field to as many as ten films in 2009, it said explicitly that non-fiction could now compete. Seventeen years later, three animated films have managed it and no documentary has, Variety noted in its analysis of the campaign.

A24 has the rest of its slate pointing the same way, and the studio is close enough to the record for most best picture nominations in a single year that people are counting. That mark has stood since 1937, when MGM landed five.

The film itself

Variety's review called it a "shameless, fascinating" look at entitled duplicity, which is roughly where the rest of the notices landed. Fielder's method has always sat in the space between documentary and performance, and a subject who built a company on performance is either the perfect match or the worst possible one, depending on the critic.

Oppenheim has had a busy month. His fiction feature Primetime played in competition at Venice.

The awkward question

There is an argument, not yet made loudly, that a best picture campaign for this film rewards a convicted fraudster with another camera. Holmes was convicted on four counts in 2022 and is serving her sentence. The film exists because she wanted to be filmed.

A24 releases it in cinemas in October, which is when the campaign starts properly and the Academy's documentary branch gets to decide whether it feels flattered or annoyed.